


Hand of fate

by Helel



Category: Final Fantasy VIII, Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bickering, Child Soldiers, Clones, F/F, F/M, Family Drama, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mind Manipulation, Mind Meld, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Sibling Bonding, Slow Burn, Sorceresses, Trans Character, Underage Drinking, Underage Kissing, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2020-01-31 05:04:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 42,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18584353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Helel/pseuds/Helel
Summary: The guy, though- well. He’s pretty. Sora thinks, why not? It’s not like he has anything better to do with his time, and he can always leave if the guy turn out to be dull. Or even worse, a bitch.He should start socializing more, anyway. His only friend is his sister, and that’s- that’s so fucking sad.“Hey,” he says, cursing himself as he realizes he doesn’t know how to make the guy notice him. He should have approached from another angle. Does he- should he touch him? Pat him on the shoulder? How do other people interact, again?Why has he never learned? Why is he so damn similar to Leon?But the guy turns around and it’s too late for Sora to leave now. They share a look, and really, calling it awkward is an understatement.Sora is hating everything about this. His heart is beating too fast, his teeth clenched together like they always get when he’s embarrassed out of his mind. “Haven’t seen you around before,” he says, forcing himself to speak. It’s stupid. One hundred percent. It’s stupid and he is stupid.





	1. One

Balamb Garden is great. Sora loiters in the halls and no one dares say anything because he’s the son of the Commander. He vandalizes the training center and no one bats an eye because his dad is ferocious and scary and a villain.  
He misses his classes and everyone stays quiet because he’s the trouble child with the dead mom.  
He gets angry and people step back because he’s the Boy Sorceress – not like there is a male version of the word or anything – and he’s dangerous and scary. And maybe a villain too, like his dad. 

The Garden is totally great, though. He will insist about this until his throat bleeds. Everything is one hundred percent great. 

“We’re thinking of going back to Esthar,” dad says, slow and focused on Sora like he’s waiting for an explosion. 

Sora looks back and shakes his head, puts on that contrite-confused expression he does so well. “But Balamb is great,” he says, because it will keep up the lie he’s been building up for years and because he definitely doesn’t want to go back to grandpa's. The Presidential palace is… great, too, yes, but so overwhelming. The mere thought of it makes his stomach clench and his heart skip beats. 

“Cut the crap, Sora,” Leon says, waving his hand in that way he does. Sora doesn’t click his tongue but it’s a very close call. Leon is the worst.  
Adults are not really high on the list of people Sora enjoys or trusts, but Leon is worse. Leon is a thorn in his side, always. He’s brutish and unfriendly and always brooding over something. Sora doesn't understand why his dad is still with Leon. Maybe it’s for him and Xion, really. If so, Sora sends him many unvoiced thanks because he would rather take them together than lose his only real and alive parent. 

“It's not about you Sora, really,” his dad says. “We're all nervous. Tired. A vacation would do us wonders.” 

“That doesn’t sound forced at all,” Xion drawls. She and Sora roll their eyes at each other, perfectly synchronized. 

“You lost the rights to speak about this, Xion,” Leon says. He likes to play both Commander and father at the same time. It’s a tragedy to see. A pitiful, pitiful show of nonexistent control over the situation. Leon is in shambles and he should stop pretending otherwise.  
But then again, Sora isn't one to speak about pretending. He just wishes Leon would do it better. 

“It's not like anyone got hurt or anything,” Xion says. Sora keeps his snickering inside. She is not as lucky as he is, tragically. She's the deviant, the scandal. And she's so proud of herself for it. 

“Be quiet or leave,” Leon says, eyes full of ice. Sora has yet to find something funnier than making him mad, honestly. 

Xion rolls her eyes again but she stays quiet, as ordered, showing her palms in a clear gesture of surrender.  
They will both flip their shit if Leon starts one of his screaming fits, seriously.  
He is tired and nervous, it’s plain obvious, and a vacation would do him wonders. 

“Maybe you should go and take a vacation on your own,” Sora offers, trying his best to let his voice sound sweet and concerned, looking at his dad because if he has to stare and talk at Leon directly he will probably cause the office to explode. “We’re safe here, and we would only be in your way.”

“You wouldn’t,” his dad says, shaking his head, resolve strengthening and patience running thin.  
Sora has one chance to make this less shitty than it could be and he has… not even half an idea of how to accomplish that.  
It’s very probable that his dad and Leon have already chosen to go back to Esthar and this little familiar reunion is just to let them know about it in a mostly civil way.  
Probably Leon just wanted to tell them to pack their bags, throw them in the car, possibly without saying one word about the whole ordeal and drive them out of Balamb. 

He shares a look with his sister and sees the resigned hopelessness in her eyes, the same he feels building in his chest. “What about Xion’s girlfriend?” he asks his dad, doing his best. His performance skills are… well trained, to say the least, but he has very little hope about all this. Xion can’t support him with her own act. She has been silenced. She bites her lower lip to stop herself from laughing. 

Sora gives her the look of desperation, the one that says there is nothing else he can do, the one that says he’s doing his literal best.  
And he realizes it’s not a good excuse. Xion’s girlfriend has broken up with her two months ago, very publicly, at that. 

“What about her?” dad asks, but Sora knows he’s just playing along. Maybe he is entertained by his children’s antics, or maybe he doesn’t want to leave either. 

“She’s pregnant.”

“No, she isn’t,” Leon says, giving both Sora and Xion a very clear, very angry look. “I checked her medical records.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, _dad_ ,” Xion mumbles, crossing her arms on her chest. 

“Kids, we made sure there would be nothing stopping you from leaving,” Seifer says, and he sounds so tranquil about it, so diplomatic.  
Sora could never hate him as he hates Leon, but right now it’s close. It’s very close. 

“Except for our whole lives, right?” he asks, “You kept those in mind while you were making your plans, didn’t you?” he accuses, looking at Leon, now, because he could never take this tone with his dad. He won’t. Not ever. 

“What lives?” Leon asks back, brows furrowed and expression the complete opposite of smug. “You’re not happy here. None of us is happy here. We’re not doing it to spite you.” 

“So it’s done?” Xion asks. Leon’s face is very clear. Or she shuts up or she will be very encouraged to leave the room. She shuts up. 

Dad says: “No,” and Leon says “Yes,” and they glare at each other. 

“We’re taking your opinion in consideration. As long as you have valid concerns about not moving out,” Leon redacts. 

“We don’t want to,” Sora tells them both. It should be more than enough. But then again, he has learned a long time ago that adults are shit at listening. He hopes to never become like that. 

“That’s not a reason,” Leon says, eyelids almost closed over his eyes. He looks tired, yes, but Sora has more compassion for the monsters he kills in the training center than for him, so he just soldiers on. 

“Nothing would be a valid reason. You’ve made your mind up and that’s it,” he says. But still, his dad is in the room and Sora doesn’t let all his hatred show. Seifer doesn’t deserve it, for one, and he has a reputation to maintain, a mask that doesn’t need cracking. A useful mask. 

“Sora, that’s not true,” his dad says. He is a dreamer, despite his life and his past. Despite the things people say about him behind his back, despite his rep. He is a dreamer and he is probably blinded by love, Sora rationalizes. He shouldn’t make it a fault, he shouldn’t blame him for that. But he does. 

“Listen,” Leon starts, and it’s the worst starter he could have used. Sora hates it. He’s always like that. He orders them to listen, like anything he says will make a difference, like he even has anything smart to say. Or reasonable. “We can always come back if Esthar proves to be a bad idea.”

“We moved out exactly because it was a bad idea in the first place!” Sora half screams at him.  
Yes, that has been five years ago, yes that had been a bad time, yes there are a thousand reasons why going to Esthar now would be different. It still doesn’t change the fact that he doesn’t want to go. Nor does Xion. 

“No, we moved out because you needed training. And you’re not getting it here,” Leon contradicts him. 

“We like it here,” Sora tries again. One last appeal, he tells himself. One last appeal and then he will concede.  
Laguna loves him and his sister, after all. And they love their granddad. They can make it work, in Esthar. If this doesn’t work, they will adapt. Because that’s what they’re good at. “This is all our lives.”

“And you’re wasting it,” Leon says, hands on the table. His patience, too, is drying up. 

“Esthar is bigger. Maybe you will find something to do there. Find some friends. Get yourselves a hobby that isn’t maddening the staff,” dad says. 

Sora sighs and doesn’t say anything at all. He is silenced too, and he stays quiet next to Xion, the solidarity they share is palpable but not spoken aloud. 

—

They move.  
Life goes on.  
They adapt. 

Esthar is bigger, and filled with adventures to be had. And Sora doesn’t dislike it, no. He has a room of his own, no timetables to follow and Leon doesn’t have the same control over him that he had back in the Garden, which is a great bonus, truth be told.  
He has the chance to get a bite of freedom, finally.

And, in a way, even if he hates having to acknowledging it at all, since it means proving Leon right, he is more relaxed. Xion, too. He sees her stress seeping out of her limbs, her face more and more tranquil as the weeks go on. And so is dad. He looks content, almost. He looks at peace, amongst people who don’t badmouth him around every corner, amongst friends. 

Being in Esthar isn’t bad. It’s not great, though. The city is loud. Loud like the Garden has never been. It’s chaotic and bothersome and Sora loses sleep, loses appetite, loses enthusiasm.  
The magic sounds like knives clashing, like metal scraping against metal, and it feels like blood coating his mouth, all the time. It pricks his skin, it seeps into his bones. 

Xion says it feels the same to her, but she’s more used to things that hurt. She is more fond of loud and brash, of chaos. She says it doesn’t bother her at all, and Sora believes her. How can he not believe her when her eyes sparkle and her smile is so wide it must hurt and she looks so at ease in her skin, all the time. 

Sora will learn to love this place, for his sister and his dad, if for nothing else. 

—

“Grandpa is looking for you,” Xion tells him, skip-jumping on the rooftop and sitting next to him, her grace a thing Sora looks at with pure envy in his heart. He isn’t clumsy, not by any stretch, but he will never have her same— _je ne sais quoi_. Maybe it’s her magic, maybe it’s just part of her. He is extremely pissed at genetics about it, though, and he will never not be. 

“About the ball?” 

“About the ball,” she says, nodding. They look at the skyline together, their silence comfortable, their magic singing in tune. In another life, he would have been her Knight.  
There is some part of Sora that mourns the lost opportunity. He loves his magic as much as he can love something that has been made his by the death of his mother. He is content with his Fate and all, he is. But Xion… she was born a Sorceress and it shows. Magic is nicer on her, it fits perfectly, tailored to her like it will never be to him, and he mourns the loss of the bond they could have shared.  
  
They would have been more powerful than anything else in the universe, all on their own. They would have been Gods. 

“You’re going?” he asks her. Last time they talked about it she was unsure. She has also been eying the list of invitees in the hopes of finding a cute girl their age to charm. Maybe she has found one, in the meantime. 

“Not if you’re not. It’s gonna be boring as fuck,” she says. 

“Well,” Sora says, giving her a look. Xion snorts. 

“Yeah,” she agrees.  
Yeah, it’s going to be boring anyway. Leon and dad will want them on their best behavior, and they would never purposefully ruin the event for their grandpa. Not this year. Laguna has been organizing this since the last ball, after all. 

“Anyone interesting on the list?” he has to ask. Maybe they’re lucky and this year someone will be worth the pain of participating.

“Not that I know of, no,” Xion says, shrugging her shoulders. Even that looks graceful on her. Sora is burning with envy. Positively consumed by it. “Same all boring people. War heroes, neighboring royals. The works.”

“I say we skip it,” Sora offers, smiling at the skyline because Xion will know it’s meant for her. She pokes him in the side. 

“Grandpa will be sad,” she says. Sora doesn’t deign that of an answer. “And he’s looking for you.”

“You said.”

“I said,” she says. “You’re not going to talk to him, though.”

“I will,” Sora assures. Another poke. He sighs. “Whatever, I’m going.” He gets up and she follows him. But where he has to crawl his way back inside by the window, she just let herself fall from the side of the roof, her magic taking the shape of great wings of steel on her back. 

“See you,” she calls at him.  
Sora envies her so much. 

—

The thing, with his magic, is that it’s not his.  
It won’t acknowledge him as its rightful master, no matter how much he meditates, focuses, begs, lashes out.  
It won’t come to him at all, not in useful ways, not when he wants it to. 

It spikes, sometimes. More and more often as he can feel it build up inside of him, get wider and worse, steal more space inside his core. It spikes and he gets these ferocious migraines, his nose bleeds, his eyes bleed, his ears bleed.  
When he’s lucky, he gets unconscious before the bleeding starts. When he’s not… well. He ends up unconscious anyway, but not before having to live through some drama. 

Xion doesn’t get these problems. She has been born with it. She is comfortable in her body as the magic grows alongside her. She is powerful. She can use it. It’s an intrinsic part of her. Righteous.  
She doesn’t explode without rhyme or reason. She can let herself be angry because she is at ease with her magic. 

Everyone says he will be alright as soon as he finds a suitable Knight. The magic will be calmer, then. It will be pliable.  
Sora doesn’t have much hopes about it, though. He doesn’t even have expectations anymore. He doesn’t wish his magic would be friendlier, he doesn’t cry himself raw wishing it would listen to him.  
He just hates it. Freely and openly. He hates it.  
It’s a reminder of his mom, of her madness and her death. It’s what has taken her away from him and his sister. 

But it’s also the reason he has Seifer, now.  
If Rinoa had been alive he would never have had his dad. 

He can’t be grateful towards his magic because of it, because it’s not a direct consequence of it, but he’s not trying to take it out of his core anymore, he’s not trying to get rid of it anymore.  
For his dad, and because it’s a great asset to intimidate stupid people. 

He’s the Boy Sorceress. People are scared of him. Find him wrong and unsettling. And Sora relishes in it like he relishes in nothing else. 

He finds himself smiling as he steps into Laguna’s office. Most of the staff knows him to be harmless, by now, and maybe find him the right shade of charming — never like Xion, though, he is not gifted like she is at making people like him — but the new additions scamper away when they see him coming, and it never fails to put him in a good mood. 

“My boy!” Laguna greets him, his smile wide like always as he gets up from his desk and his work. “We missed you at breakfast.”

“Sorry,” Sora says, even if he isn’t sorry at all. “I was sleeping. Xion said you want to talk to me,” he says. Knowing Laguna, and he knows his grandpa tragically well, he doesn’t even remember about it anymore. And Sora will waste all his daylight listening to the man’s ramblings about the damned ball. 

“Oh, right. Yes. About the ball-” Laguna starts. Sora keeps his smile in place and sighs inside. “I was thinking maybe you and your sister could wear the SeeD uniform this year. No, wait don’t say anything-” Sora was definitely not planning to say anything at all. “I know you’re not SeeDs yet, but it would look much nicer than… that.” He gestures at Sora’s outfit. “And, anyway, you’re going to-”

Sora is very unimpressed by all this.  
“We’re not coming,” he interrupts. He gives his grandpa a smile that he knows is shining and heartwarming. He has been perfecting this smile for seventeen years and eleven months. It’s infallible. “We’re sorry, grandpa, but we would get bored out of our minds.” Like every other year, like every other ball. 

“But- You can’t not be there,” Laguna says, yes narrowed. “Sora, kid, it’s the event of the year. Everyone will want to see you.”

“I know,” Sora says, going for a diplomatic tone, sweet and understanding. Laguna is easy to deal with. Much easier than his dad and Leon are. Laguna is- not stupid, no. Sora would never be so unwise as to think his grandpa stupid. But he is much less attuned to his bullshit than Leon is. Than his dad is, to an extent. And he is easily swayed by the puppy-dog eyes. “But standing around while everyone ogles at us and tells us how much older we got is very boring.”

“It’s not that bad,” Laguna says, more like a plea than anything else. “And you can totally leave whenever you want! Come on, Sora. For me.”

Sora rolls his eyes, but only in his mind. It wouldn’t do to let Laguna know how much unimpressed he is, after all. He needs to have his grandpa think he is just like the mask he puts on. He can’t let him see the seams.  
Adults. How bothersome.  
“Can’t we just do something else? Me, you and Xion? Maybe lunch?” he tries. 

“It’s the event of the year,” Laguna repeats. “And I’ve invited even more people than usual,” he singsongs, so very proud of himself.  
Sora weights his options.  
He’s sorely lacking. He wishes Xion would be here. He wishes she stopped leaving all the dirty work to him.  
‘Good training’ she calls it, but Sora knows it’s complete bullshit, all of it. She just doesn’t want to deal with people if she can help it. And he’s the idiot who always lets her get away with it.  
“From other countries,” Laguna insists, giving Sora such a hopeful smile. 

He feels like a weakling as he asks “What people?” and he knows Laguna knows he’s won this round. 

—

Xion laughs so hard she has tears in her eyes. “You’re so weak,” she says, sprawled out on his bed like she doesn’t give a fuck abut wrinkling the covers. She doesn’t, actually. Sora knows she doesn’t and he hates her for it.  
“But we’re not wearing the uniforms,” she says, now serious, looking him dead in the eyes. 

“We’re not,” he tells her, rolling his eyes. 

“I can’t believe you let him talk you into it. Hyne, you’re so weak, Sora.” 

“Fuck you,” he says, hating himself and hating how right she is. He’s so, so weak. And he hates not being able to be mean. He hates it one hundred percent. If he could be mean it would be over for everyone on the damn planet. But he can’t. 

“So, what did he bribe you with?” Xion asks, sitting up and upsetting the bed even more. The soldier instincts in Sora rile up like warning flares, and he has to breathe deep and slow to keep it cool. “Cash? Spaceship? Please tell me it’s a spaceship. Ragnarok!”

“As if,” Sora says. “Leon wouldn’t let me drive it anyway.”

“Because that has stopped us before.”

“Dad would be disappointed with us,” Sora says. Xion takes a second to think on it and then she nods, gestures for him to spill the beans. “Grandpa invited the General.” 

“Oh,” Xion drawls out, far longer than needed. “The General,” she teases.  
Hyne, but Sora hates her when she is like this. 

“Fuck you, again,” he says.

“And you really think the General is going to come? Like. For real?” Xion says, and her disbelief is the same Sora feels in his heart, the same he fears to be true, but he flips her off anyway, with both hands. 

“There is, like, one percent of chance more than the last years.”

“Make it oh-oh-oh-oh-oh point one.”

“No,” Sora says. “I said what I said. And it’s still more than the last years.”

“Pathetic,” Xion tells him, pursing her mouth at him, all- all disappointed, like she expected better from him, like she really thinks him pathetic. And maybe she does, and maybe Sora is, but he clicks his tongue at her anyway.

“Say what you want, but if he shows up it’s gonna be great. And I know you want to see him too.”

“Sure,” Xion concedes. “It’s the General.”

“That’s what I said!” Sora whines at her, shaking his arms in the air. Xion is maddening. He’s so fucking close to sending her out of his room. 

“You’re just a loser about it, Sora.”

“You’re a loser,” he rebukes, sighing deeply and feeling stupid. “Go away.”

“Are we really going?” she asks him, completely ignoring his request. He has not yet learned how to make her listen to him like Leon does. He will, though. Sooner or later. “Really, really?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Discomfort takes a bite out of him. “It’s gonna be so fucking boring.”

Xion laughs at him some more. “Yeah,” she says. “What are we wearing?”  
He looks at her and he knows she knows what he wants to say about it, even if he won’t deign her of an answer. “Whatever,” she says, rolling her eyes. “We can’t go like last year, it’s overdone.”

“I know it’s overdone,” Sora spits out at her. He can’t believe he let himself be swayed into this. He’s so pathetic. “Clown costumes?” he proposes. Xion clicks her tongue, completely unimpressed. “You choose then, I don’t give a fuck. Go away.”

“I choose, then,” she says, like a threat. 

“Like fuck you choose. We choose together.” Last year they just went to the ball in their normal, everyday clothes. It had been fun right to the point dad had seen them and gave them that Look. The year before had been fairy costumes. The year before that had been princess dresses.  
This year- well. Sora refuses to wear the SeeD uniform. He will not. Not even if it would make Laguna happy. Not even, Hyne damn it all, if it would make their dad proud.  
He’s not a _real_ cadet and he’s not going to take the SeeD exam ever. He’s not going to be complicit in a system that hates him and his sister. A system that made his dad an outcast and his mom a threat.  
Not for anything in the world.  
“Any shining idea?” he asks Xion. She sighs at him. 

“You’re a disappointment.”

“You too,” he says. 

“Whatever. Listen,” she starts, putting on that voice that Sora can’t stand, not even if he knows she’s mocking Leon. It’s instinctive repulsion. “I’m going out. If you don’t have any idea by tonight, I choose.”

“No, Xion. Fuck you, seriously. You always let me do the ugly parts and then whine at me when I fail. I choose.”

She laughs at him and ignores him, like usual. “See you later.”

“See you,” he tells her, finally giving into the need to fix his bed. 

It’s going to be a couple of very boring, very painful days. 

—

In the end, Xion chooses. It’s just how things go between them. Sora doesn’t mind it too much but he wants to make sure she knows he’s giving up on his own volition. Almost doing her a favor, honestly. Since she’s the youngest and all. He’s being a good big twin brother and nothing else. 

Xion lets him go away with it, as a good sister would. She is kind to him.

“This is going to be the most boring two hours of our lives,” she says as he fixes her bow-tie.  
They’re going to the stupid ball and they’re going in suits, because for once they don’t want to shame Laguna, even if he would deserve it. A little.  
It’s not the uniform and that’s all Sora cares about, honestly.  
He’s even happy about the suit. They look damn fine. 

“It’s gonna take more than two hours,” he tells her, mercilessly reminding her of the truth. They’re gonna waste all night on this thing.  
Two hours. Hah. Sora wishes it would take only two hours. Two hours are going to be wasted on the opening speech, the appetizers, the wait for the late guests. And then there’s dinner. And after that the ball proper. The dance. The worst part of the whole ordeal, hands down. 

Sora hates himself most of anything, right now. 

“I’m leaving early,” Xion says, poking him in the stomach. Sora burps at her, making her laugh. “I told dad and he said it’s okay.”

“You bitch,” Sora says. “Fucking- unbelievable. You can’t leave me alone!” 

“I will.” She gives him a beatific smile. Sora doesn’t feel very beatified by it. Quite the opposite, actually. 

He hates her so much. “I hate you so much,” he tells her, all his disbelief and- despair, seriously, showing on his face. He’s sure of it. Xion laughs at him.  
It’s going to be the most boring night of his life. 

“You’ll survive,” she says, fixing his bow-tie in turn. “You might even be forced to socialize.”  
Yeah, sure, Sora tells her with his eyes. She pokes his cheek. “Look alive,” she says. 

—

Laguna has been fretting all day but his opening speech is- well. Not great, in Sora’s opinion, but it’s fine. Everyone gives a polite round of applause — because they’re kind of obligated to, to be completely honest — and it’s painless. Boring, but painless.  
The usual _welcome everyone to the annual ball_ and blah blah blah. The usual stuff Sora has heard for the past seventeen years.  
Leon wants them to be present at every ball, after all. It’s Laguna’s birthday, he says, like it means that Sora should want to get bored out of his mind. Like he should make this sacrifice and be happy about it, too. 

Leon, like all other years, is wearing his SeeD uniform. Dad isn’t, obviously, and Sora can’t stand it. Again, he doesn’t know why Seifer doesn’t leave. Why he forces himself into that relationship despite everything. Maybe it is for them. The usual ‘do it for the kids’ story. He really hopes it’s not that, though, because he would feel even more guilty about it if it were. 

Dad looks happy, though. Relaxed in his shining white coat, hair slicked back and shoulders squared. He looks at home like he never did in the Garden. 

“You look nice,” he tells Sora, again, patting his shoulder. “Thanks for not making a scene.”

Sora would roll his eyes but he’s on self-imposed best behavior. “It’s nothing,” he says. 

“Your father was pretty worried about it,” Seifer goes on. Sora doesn’t want to talk about Leon, though. He would rather talk about anything else. He would rather talk about the weather. Hyne, he would rather listen to Laguna’s speech again. 

“Thank Xion. She chose,” Sora says, shrugging. The suit is not comfortable, but it’s better than the uniform would have been. Much better than some of the costumes he wore to the other balls too. And it does look good on him, even if it makes everyone a touch too comfortable for his tastes.  
He feels… assimilated. Conforming. He hates it. 

And Xion has already abandoned him for her date so he can’t even whine at her for it. He will set fire to her eyebrow later. 

“You can leave too. In a while,” dad reassures him, a knowing smile on his face. Sora appreciates the effort but he’s already feeling sick to his stomach and the idea of spending even one second more amongst all these people makes him want to gauge his own eyes out. He smiles back, though. It’s not his dad’s fault, it’s not anyone’s fault if not his. He’s really pathetic, giving into Laguna’s wishes without even fighting it. 

“It’s fine, dad, really,” he says, hoping Seifer would take the hint to just leave him alone. He’s not in the mood to talk or to socialize or to be polite. 

“Tomorrow—” his dad starts, but Sora is not looking at him, he’s looking at the entrance and he sees a sparkle of silver hair, and his heart flies in his throat so fast he can feel it push against his trachea. 

If he sees General Sephiroth… he will die. He will probably die.  
He will most definitely die.  
And maybe Xion is right, maybe he is a loser about it, but the General is his hero. 

“Sora,” his dad calls him, snapping his fingers in front of Sora’s face. “Did you hear me?”

“No,” Sora says, the glint of silver now lost in the crowd. Laguna should have invited shorter people, so the General would have stood out better, in his opinion. But no, everyone is a fucking giant in this place and now Sora can’t see whomever it just arrived and he doesn’t know if he should be hopeful or not about it. 

“What did you see?” his dad asks, looking around like he expects there to be a threat. 

“Nothing,” Sora tells him. “What did you say?” 

“We’re going to talk, tomorrow,” Seifer says, still scouting the place. Sora rolls his eyes now, secure in the knowledge that his dad won’t see him. 

“About?”

“Not now, Sora. Tomorrow.”

“’Kay,” he says, taking advantage of Seifer’s distraction. There’s no way to make him relax again, not until he has looked everywhere for something that could spell disaster. Sora knows all too well. He’s half sorry about it, half irritated. But at least he has a reason to stay. 

—

It’s after dinner that Sora finally catches a glint of silver hair in the corner of his eyes again.  
Tragically, it’s not the General. There is a pit of disappointment in his stomach, as wide as his damned magic, and just as painful.  
The guy, though- well. He’s pretty. Young, too. Maybe Sora’s same age, maybe a couple years older than him, and Sora thinks, why not? It’s not like he has anything better to do with his time, and he can always leave if the guy turn out to be dull. Or even worse, a bitch. 

Many people are, at these events. Far too many for his likings. 

He approaches as casually as he can, felling just a lot out of his comfort zone. Like. On another planet compared to his comfort zone. It’s fine, he tells himself, willing it to be true.  
It’s fine and can leave if it turns out to be a terrible idea.  
He should start socializing more, anyway. His only friend is his sister, and that’s- that’s so fucking sad. 

“Hey,” he says, cursing himself as he realizes he doesn’t know how to make the guy notice him. He should have approached from another angle. Does he- should he touch him? Pat him on the shoulder? How do other people interact, again?  
Why has he never learned? Why is he so damn similar to Leon? 

But the guy turns around and it’s too late for Sora to leave now. They share a look, and really, calling it awkward is an understatement.  
Sora is hating everything about this. His heart is beating too fast, his teeth clenched together like they always get when he’s embarrassed out of his mind. “Haven’t seen you around before,” he says, forcing himself to speak. It’s stupid. One hundred percent. It’s stupid and he is stupid. 

The guy’s eyes narrow, his shoulders get tense. “I guess not,” he says. Sora is one breath away from turning around and leaving. Seriously. He’s making an ass out of himself. 

“I’m Sora,” he says, inhaling deeply from his nose. He wonders how Xion does this. She’s so good at talking to people. He envies her too much to be healthy, honestly. “The President’s grandson.”

The guy stares some more. Sora knows how to read people. It’s the one thing he’s good at. But this dude… he has no idea what’s going on in his head. “Riku,” he says, eventually. After Sora has freaked out in his head a couple times. He even goes as far as to offer a bow. “Representing for General Crescent.”

The sound that comes out of Sora then is… indescribable. He’s dying. He’s making the worst first impression ever. He’s making a complete idiot of himself. He is an idiot, he knows, but he shouldn’t go around showing people.  
His inside are clenching so hard he’s afraid he’s going to puke all over Riku.  
Representing for General Crescent.  
Hyne.  
“Gimme a sec,” he pleads, closing his eyes and trying to breathe through the complete home-makeover happening inside his body. His lungs are now in his throat, his heart somewhere around his intestine. Everything else is just collapsing on him. 

“Yeah, that’s how most people react,” Riku says, and he sounds so very unimpressed. Sora is so very unimpressed with himself too. 

“Sorry,” Sora says, focusing on the guy’s face and feeling ashamed of himself.  
He knows how that feels, honestly. He should know better. “Sorry. I just thought he wouldn’t- I mean. I- I’ve never talked to another human being before in my life. I’m so sorry,” he rambles, taking one very definitive step back and planning the quickest escape of his life. 

But Riku laughs, stopping his thoughts, the routes he’s mapping in his head disappearing. “I imagined you would be different,” he says.  
Sora doesn’t know what to make of a statement like that, and it must show on his face because Riku goes on. “I mean, you’re the Sorcerer. Everyone knows about you.”

“I’m. I am. That. Yes,” he says. The Sorcerer. It sounds a lot better than Boy Sorceress does. It’s the first time someone has ever called him that. 

“Do you welcome all the guests like this?” Riku asks, mean but not cruel. His smile is nice enough. 

“I never talk to people. That wasn’t a joke,” Sora tells him, relaxing his shoulders as much as he can. He can do this. He totally can. 

“It shows,” Riku says. “Not to say you’re not the most amusing person around, mind.”

“Thanks,” Sora drawls. Well, okay, he’s not going to do this socializing thing anymore. No thanks. He’s tried it and it sucks. 

“No, seriously. No offense to the President, but this thing is boring,” Riku says. 

“I know,” Sora says, a spark of comradeship lighting up in his chest, where his heart is supposed to be but isn’t. “And I’m forced to come, every single year.”

“Tragic,” Riku says. His smile is very nice, Sora notices. Like, very, very nice. 

“Do you- You wanna get out of here?” he offers, scandalizing himself. He has never been this intrepid in his life. Not without Xion at his side, at least. 

“Please,” Riku says. 

—

The pros of being the President’s grandson far outshine the cons, tonight.  
Sora has full access to the kitchens, which means he has full access to the booze, and he has full access to his room, which means he has a safe space all for himself — and Riku — where he can be a lot less bored, truth be told. 

Riku represents General Crescent since last year, he says. He is tasked with events like this, where diplomacy isn’t needed but presence will put the General in a better light in the eyes of many other war heroes and important figures all over the world. 

Riku says, half slurred with the wine coursing through his system, “I’m not exactly his son, if you know what I mean, but-” and he doesn’t finish the sentence. Sora has no fucking idea what he means but he laughs anyway. 

He answers with: “Shit, I would love not to be my father’s son,” which is far too much and far too personal, but he has no filter and Riku just nods at him and agrees. They drink to that, which might turn out to be a bad idea, tomorrow, or in a couple of hours, or whenever the damn ball ends and his dad will come looking for him.  
He will take anyone bar from Leon because if he has to see Leon’s face tonight he will- he doesn’t know what he will do, but it won’t be pretty. “He’s so… he’s awful,” he goes on, and Riku looks confused, for a moment. 

“Ah, your father. Yeah,” he says, nursing his bottle. “Yeah. Fuck, I bet. Talk about big shoes to fill.”

“No, really, he’s the worst. He abandoned us for like. Years. I hate him,” Sora says, laughing at himself, at the whole situation, laughing at Leon for being an asshole and too much of a coward to properly leave him and Xion for real. No, he has to pretend to be a father, now. He has to role-play being a parent. Because he feels guilty, probably.  
Sora hates him so much. 

“I’m selling that to the paps,” Riku says, and it’s probably a joke but Sora still sways towards him to send a glare straight into his eyes.

“Don’t you dare,” he hisses. 

“I’m joking!” Riku exclaims, swaying too, and their foreheads bump into each other. It’s not painful. It’s kinda nice, actually. Sora feels… stable. Balanced. “I’m a clone,” Riku tells him, voice super quiet. “I was made in a lab.”

That’s so… so fucking cool. He says: “That’s so cool,” and Riku laughs, kind of disbelieving. 

“It’s not really. I’m like. Super fucked up about it.”

“No!” Sora yells, and Riku’s laughter is contagious. Wholly. “That’s so cool, I wish I was born in a test tube. Like. Fuck Leon. I wanna be an experiment.”

“Seriously,” Riku says, and he keeps laughing, and they stay with their faces smashed together like two idiots too drunk to move. Sora is having fun, actually. First time he has ever had fun at one of Laguna’s parties. Riku is a blessing and a miracle. He tells him so. He tells him: “You’re a fucking- a fucking. You’re a blessing, Riku,” and Riku blushes. He’s super cute and Sora is super drunk, and their faces are super close. 

It doesn’t take even one single braincell to plan what comes after. Sora is just feeling brave and stupid and happy. He kisses him. Or, well. He tries his best. He has no idea what the final result is, but it must be good because Riku’s face is red and lovely and he laughs, again, and lets Sora stay close to him. 

“I really didn’t think you would be like this,” he says, after some time spent in silence. Silence and giggles. Sora is more comfortable now than he has been since- probably forever. He feels alright in his skin, and the loud and brash magic around him is tranquil, for once, and his mouth tastes like wine and like Riku, not a trace of copper or blood or other evil stuff coating his tongue. “I thought you would be like… I don’t know.”

“Like what?” Sora pushes him, his hands wandering over Riku’s face, fingers playing with his bangs. His hair is so pretty. Silver and silky and straight as silk and so long. 

“Spoiled as fuck,” Riku says, like the beginning of a long list. “An asshole. I don’t know. Like your father, I guess.” Sora laughs, a little. He knows he is like Leon, in some ways. He wishes he weren’t, but- eh. Genetics. Apples from trees and all that stuff. “Shit, sorry,” Riku says, patting Sora on the shoulder and looking away, focusing too much attention on the wall next to them. “I meant no offense. Really.”

“No, no, please. Keep insulting him, it’s so hot.”  
Riku’s brows furrow in disgust, probably, or maybe confusion. Maybe Sora is the confused one, he doesn’t even know. “I’m joking,” he says, just to make it clear. “Well. You are hot. But I’m joking about the weird part of it.”

“Shit,” Riku drawls, back to red. He takes a sip from his bottle. “Thanks. You too,” he says, tone completely flat. His eyes are glassed over. Sora sits up to stare at him. 

“This is the time to tell me you’re straight, dude,” he says. 

Riku laughs at him. “Why would I ever do that?”

“Because.”

“Well. Well-” he points at Sora and his expression is very confused now. Sora knows how to read people. He’s very good at reading people. “Well,” he says a third time, sounding final. He nods to himself and takes another sip of wine. Sora lets him, sensing his embarrassment, his circling through thoughts and emotions. Riku puts the bottle down and grabs his face, kisses him again. Sora smiles into it, very proud of himself for someone that has done absolutely nothing. “That’s so insulting,” Riku says, after. 

“I’m sorry,” Sora tells him, even if he’s not, really. Not even a bit. 

“Not once in my life I’ve ever been so offended,” Riku says, blithe like nothing else in the whole city. 

“Yeah, I’m sorry,” he repeats, letting his head falls against Riku’s neck. He smells like wine and… something sweet. Something delicious. Something Sora can’t for the life of him recognize. But he likes it. “Are you staying? The city is great, if you stay I’ll show you.”

“Sure,” Riku says, a bit stiff. Maybe it’s because Sora is breathing on his neck. More like panting, really. He is very drunk and very hot. The room is too hot. Riku is too hot. 

“Great,” he says. 

—

And—  
Life sucks.

Sora wakes up under the icy staring of none other than Leon. He is sprawled all over Riku, on the floor, his head pounding like a bitch and surrounded by four bottles of wine. All currently empty or very close. 

“Get up,” Leon says, not an invitation. Not at all.  
Sora gets up because he knows it will be better, in the long run. It will save him a- well. A bit of pain, at best. If Leon isn’t completely mad at him. Which he probably is, even if Sora really doesn’t deserve it. He has been very well-behaved yesterday. He hasn’t even caused one little scene at all. 

“Reporting for duty, sir,” he slurs, because he needs to let Leon know that he’s still the same little shit as always.  
Riku, still on the floor and blessedly asleep, starts to stir. If he wakes up… Sora doesn’t know if it will be better or worse, honestly. Much less embarrassing, probably. Sharing misery. There was a saying about that. Something Latin and pretentious.

“Sora,” Leon says. Just that. Just his name and nothing more, and Sora knows he should feel ashamed for- whatever Leon thinks he should be ashamed of. But he isn’t. He has been great. Much better than the man deserves, at the very least.  
He’s been a great son. Leon should be proud. 

“Leon,” he says, undergoing the classical, standard Leon Staring. He stares back, he always stares back. 

“Care to explain?” 

Sora mulls it over in his head. Riku has stopped stirring which either means he's still asleep or pretending really well to be. “Can't you surmise on your own?” he asks back, wholly conscious of being a little shit and one hundred percent proud of himself for it. 

Leon sighs and closes his eyes. He still looks tired, even now that they’re all in Esthar like he planned. Sora doesn't care too much about it. Or well, he doesn’t care willingly. It’s not his fault if he's hyper-empathetic nor can he do anything about it.  
Leon looks at Sora, for a minute, in complete silence. Sora knows this to be a tier-one intimidation technique and he ignores it. “Very well. Wake him up and see him out. Breakfast is ready.”

“No,” Sora says, almost expecting it, really. 

“Sora,” Leon warns. Today, it seems, his patience is even shorter than usual. But Sora doesn’t budge. If he were to cede every time Leon loses it he would never get anything done in his life. 

“No,” he repeats, slow and as clearly as he can. “We made plans for the day. I’m showing him the city. I’m finally integrating into Esthar,” he says, and then, because he can’t resist, he says: “You should be happy for me.”

Leon is not impressed, but Sora didn’t expect him to be. “I don’t care. See him out. Now.”

Riku clears his throat. Sora wants to hurt something. It’s at times like this that he misses the Garden training center. “General Crescent sends his best regards, Commander, sir,” he says, voice flat, beyond shame and into complete apathy. Sora wishes he could do that trick so neatly. 

“From my son’s bedroom floor?” Leon asks, cutting like ice. Sora hates him in ways unknown to humans. 

“From the bottom of his heart, actually, sir” Riku says. He has the certainty he can leave the room unscathed and the surety that comes with never having to see Leon ever again in his life.  
Sora envies him both, truth be told. 

“I want you out of this room,” Leon says, sounding almost peaceful. “On your terms or mine.”

“That’s pushing it a bit far,” Sora interjects, placing himself squarely between the two of them. Riku is slowly getting on his feet, probably with as much of an headache as Sora, and probably just as pissed. Sora has no intention of seeing who between them is strongest. No thanks. Hard pass. “We’re coming down to breakfast. In five minutes, max. Please leave,” he says, swallowing all the pride he has. It’s a mouthful and a half, and it hurts going down, but he does it anyway, because there is no reasoning with Leon, not when he’s in one of his moods. 

Sora hates him. He hates him so much he will burst a vein or ten over it, sooner or later. He can’t wait to finally be an adult so he can leave Leon behind and never see him again.  
Just a month left, now. Just a month and a handful of days and he’s going to be free. Forever. 

Leon leaves without another world, and Sora is very thankful to Hyne. Very, very thankful.  
“I’m so sorry,” he tells Riku, turning on him as quickly as he can. “I’m. So fucking sorry.” He has never felt such shame in his life before. 

“Don’t worry,” Riku says, half a smile on his face. “I know what that’s like.”

“Soldiers,” Sora sighs, smiling back. 

“Yeah. So… breakfast? Do we dare?” 

Sora pats his shoulder and nods, mourning every other way this morning could have started. “We have to,” he says. “Just sit next to me and it will be fine.”

—

It’s not fine, obviously. Sora doesn’t know why he even hoped it would be.  
It’s so awkward and tense, he wants to cry. Xion is giving him a look. A very proud look. A very “I’m sorry” look, too. But she’s the only ally they have at the table, and for once it’s not enough.  
Usually, in some way, Sora can count on dad being at his side. Not this time. Definitely not. Not if he has to go by the glares he’s getting. 

“Good morning,” Laguna says, only because he’s the only one brass enough to break the silence. Sora is appreciating the effort, despite it being completely pointless. “Riku Crescent, right?” he asks.

Riku — who is a blessing and a miracle, still — confirms. “Yes, sir. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Laguna says, putting on an enthusiasm that couldn’t sound any faker. Sora wants to cry. It’s unbelievable. His family is awful, he hates all of this. “How’s the good General?”

“Hyne,” Xion drawls, getting the burn of their parents’ murderous looks.  
Everything sucks and Sora wants to disappear.  
He wants to get back in time and do it all differently. “Can we not?” she begs of them, looking positively pained. “It’s really embarrassing. Sora brought a boy home, what’s the damage?”

“Xi, no,” Sora hisses at her. No, he doesn’t want to have this particular fight. Not with Riku present, not at the breakfast table and definitely not with the headache building behind his eyes. 

“Was about time, anyway,” she says, smiling right at him. She’s completely evil. 

“Fuck you,” he mouths at her, feeling his face getting warmer and his will to live smaller and more pathetic. 

“Eat your breakfast, Xion,” Leon orders, so dry and icy that even Seifer stiffens up. 

They all eat, or pretend to, in Sora’s case, in silence. It’s so tense he could cut it with a knife. And maybe he would even have some troubles at it.  
He really wishes he could go back and start the morning all over again. Do it better. 

Maybe he wishes just a touch too hard. 

He doesn’t know how to explain it, really, but one moment he’s poking at his breakfast and the next he’s in his room, still sprawled on top of Riku, back in his wrinkled suit, back… to the beginning of the morning. His phone tell him it’s just past eight o’clock. And he’s totally freaking out. He shakes Riku awake, as gently as he can while his hands shake and his breath is ragged and his mind is going a mile a minute. 

What in the absolute fuck just happened?  
How is any of this possible?  
Did. Did Hyne do this, he wonders? He goes as far as to send the question upwards, towards the sky and the gods, if they can hear him, if they will even listen. 

Riku stirs awake. “Get up,” Sora whispers at him. “My father is coming and he’s pretty much pissed at both of us.”

“Huh,” Riku says, his eyes going from glassed to completely awake in less than a second. He gets up and the first thing he does — blessing that he is — is to hide the bottles. Why didn’t Sora think of that he doesn’t know, but he’s very glad Riku is with him right now. He fixes his suit as much as he can and he frets over Riku’s clothes, too, because he needs to do something with his hands or he will lose his mind.  
“Hey,” Riku says, taking his hands and gripping them kindly. “Breathe, Sora.”

“Something really weird just happened,” he says, and he has no idea how much time they have, if he even should tell Riku about it, if he would even be believed at all. Sora himself doesn’t believe it. He might have just dreamed it up. Paranoid as he is… well it’s a possibility he’s not discarding, yet. 

“What?” Riku asks, searching his face and his eyes for something. He looks… concerned. 

“I think-” there’s a knock at the door and Sora jumps out of his skin.  
Now. Magic? He has a ton of it. He knows a ton about it, too. Time magic is documented in more than one Sorceress, it’s not exactly common but it’s not super rare either.  
It’s just… he shouldn’t be able to do magic, at all. He shouldn’t be able to channel it, because his magic doesn’t recognizes him as its rightful master and it refuses to obey his wishes. 

He shouldn’t have been able to do this. If he even did anything and didn’t just imagine it completely. 

It’s Xion at the door. She looks amused. Very much amused. “Leon is on the warpath,” she says, throwing a look behind his back and wiggling an eyebrow. “I see your night went fine, after all.” 

“Xi, fuck,” Sora says, and he wants to tell her, he needs to tell her, but he has no idea how to even put it into words. What just happened. “Come in. Something fucking weird just happened.” He pulls her inside by her wrist and she lets herself be pulled. There is no moving her if she doesn’t want to be moved, after all. Solid like a fucking rock as she is. 

“If you have to brag-”

“Shut up for a second of your life,” he interrupts. “I think I went back in time.” They both stare at him, little, weirded out smiles on their faces. 

“How drunk are you?” Xion asks. She turns to stare at Riku. “How drunk are you, seriously?”

“Not that much,” Riku says, because Sora is not gonna say it. 

“I’m serious,” he tells them, feeling the panic bubbling up. He has to breathe, right. He has to breathe and breathe deeply and slowly. He has to focus on something else, but he can’t. “Okay so. Leon woke us up and he was super fucking pissed and we went down to have breakfast and it was super awkward and then I wished I could go back in time to do it all over again and. I woke up here. So. I don’t know what the fuck just happened. I’m. Freaking out.”

The door, that Xion had closed behind herself, opens on Leon’s very pissed face. He’s taken aback, for the shortest of moments, and Sora knows this only because he has learned to read him better than even his dad can. It’s survival.  
“Glad to find you awake,” he says, boring holes into Sora’s eyes.  
He has better-worse things to think about than Leon, though, and he isn’t fazed. 

“Leon, please. Let’s. I- I can do magic!” he yells, all cells of his organism, to the very last one, are vibrating with pent up energy. “I can do magic,” he says, very conscious of himself. Very aware of his every molecule. He’s awake. For the first time ever, after Rinoa’s passing, he’s finally awake. And it feels. Awful and amazing and terrifying. 

Xion puts her hands together to cover her mouth, like in prayer, and she sighs. “It was bound to happen,” she says, looking at Leon. “Madness is in our genes. Let’s kill him now and be done with it.”

“What the fuck?” Riku asks, stepping away from Xion and giving her a look that spells complete disbelief. 

“Ignore her,” both Sora and Leon say, synchronized. “What do you mean?” Leon asks him, stepping in the room, some of the tension loosening from his muscles. Fear replacing his anger. Sora knows the scent of fear, like an animal, or maybe even better than that. He knows the scent of fear and it’s the first time he has ever felt it on Leon. It’s not a good sign. 

“I mean. I think I just went back in time,” Sora says. He doesn’t want to say anything more than that because- honestly. He came back in time exactly to let that conversation be gone forever. He doesn’t want to repeat it aloud.

Leon stares at him. He surely takes in the state Sora’s in. The panic plain on his face, the shaking of his knees, his hands, his whole body. Sora doesn’t know how to feel, what emotion to listen to, but he’s very much both terrified and elated.  
“Time magic is…” Leon starts, stops himself and swallows. He puts a fist over his mouth, like he always does in front of a hard to fix problem.  
Sora might hate him but he wouldn’t trust anyone else to know what to do in this situation better than he trusts Leon. He has been the old Knight of his magic, after all. If there’s someone who knows what to do with it, it’s him. 

“Rare, I know,” Sora says, making fists with his hands, too. “But-” Leon gestures for him to be quiet and Sora shuts up, for once thankful of his father’s presence. 

And then he isn’t anymore, because Leon turn a glare to Riku, one that Sora doesn’t even have the words to describe. It’s so… wrathful, possibly? He has never seen Leon like this. So focused, so ready to kill. Maybe torture.  
He steps in between them, once again, and he feels like an idiot for thinking Leon would be reasonable about this. He is an idiot. He should have stopped with this bullshit hopefulness years ago. 

“He’s your Knight,” Leon says, his voice an arctic desert. Nuclear winter, maybe. So cold it could kill. He looks at Sora and at Riku in turn, getting more and more— weird. He barely looks like himself. 

“Damn,” Xion says, punching Sora in the shoulder. “Way to go.”

“Xion, shut up,” Leon says. He’s so still he could pass for a statue. Sora wonders if he’s about to summon Shiva, because if he is… he’s not staying. He’s not fighting Leon. Nor he will leave Riku to fight Leon either. “Sora,” he says, very slow and very much focused on him. Sora feels terrified. 

This is even worse than his first round. He wants to go back to the other timeline, now. But not really, he tells his magic, quickly and as frantic as he can. Not really, no. No more time travel. He’s barely keeping it together as it is.  
“Yes?” he asks, because if he focuses on the here and now he won’t… suggest anything that his magic might take as an order. Possibly. 

“How do you feel?”

Sora expected something else, to be honest. He is taken aback. He supposes it’s only fair. One surprise for another. “Pretty fucking scared,” he says, and he has never been more honest than this. Not to Leon, for sure.  
Xion’s eyes widen, she’s taken aback too. Sora smiles at her, in his eyes a “you didn’t expect _that_ , huh?” that makes her snort. 

“Other than that?” Leon prompts. 

“I have no idea! I’m freaking out! I can do magic!” he yells at him, his nerves so naked and so vulnerable. He feels like he’s going to puke, and the time traveling did not help his headache any. He’s going to be sick and pass out and it will be the merciful option.  
Riku puts his hands on his shoulders. 

It’s like a blanket of tranquility spreads over him. His lungs clear out, air whooshing out of him in an ordered stream, his trembling slowing to a stop. He can think clearly. 

“That’s- um,” Riku says, sharing a look with Leon. Almost apologetic.

“That’s _um_ indeed,” Leon says, keeping his eyes focused on Sora like a surgical laser. He bites on of his knuckles. A thing to behold, really, because Leon never indulges in his stress-induced habits like this. Not in front of him and Xion and definitely not in front of strangers. “Well. Congratulations,” he says, and Sora is marveled and disgusted and completely mind-blown to find that he actually means it. There is the hint of a smile — a fucking smile — on his face. His hand falls back at his side. And for the first time in seventeen years Sora can say that Leon looks happy.


	2. Two

The call doesn’t go well. Riku didn’t expect it to, truth be told, but he didn't expect— that.   
Just like he didn't expect anything that happened at the Presidential Esthar Ball. He didn’t expect Sora, he didn’t expect liking him, he didn’t expect kissing him and most of all. Most of fucking all, he didn’t expect to become the Knight of the first ever recorder Sorcerer in all of history.   
Sorceress like Xion are common enough not to be feared. They're scandalous, of course, because society is shit, but they're not _wrong_ in the same way Sora is wrong. 

Not that Riku would ever consider anything about Sora wrong. It's not about him and what he thinks. It’s about the views held by society at large. And society dictates that magic, pure and free like that of a Sorceress, belongs to women and women only.   
Which would be fine, under normal circumstances. 

But Sora is extraordinary. He’s a man and he’s a Sorcerer and Riku is his Knight.   
His Fated Knight, at that.   
It’s a recipe for disaster, truly. Riku is barely a real person as he is, and he has latent magic, sure, what’s commonly known as a Prospective inclination, but—   
He doesn’t know how to be useful to a Sorcerer. Or in general. He usually just does what he’s told and hopes it’s enough to grant him another day of existence. 

“Hey,” Sora greets him as he gets back into the Sorcerer’s room. It feels… It feels weird, being in his same space. It felt weird yesterday night, too, Riku can’t deny that. But soon enough his mind had been buzzing and turned mostly off, so he hadn’t noticed it as much.   
Right now, sober as he has never been, so conscious of his realness as to feel uncomfortable, he feels like he’s stepping into some hallowed place.   
Like he shouldn’t be here. No matter how much Sora’s eyes shine when they look upon him, no matter the warmth Sora gives him, with his smile and his acceptance and his— his… 

It feels almost like Sora is actually happy about Riku being in his space and Riku is so not used to it. It makes him ill at ease. Far, far too outside the usual treatment he receives.

He’s a gods damned clone. He is useful, yes, when he stays in line and doesn’t fuck up. He’s easily replaceable. He’s not unique, or important, or necessary.   
He’s not much more than a thing. A thing that can be produced in series. A thing that could probably be categorized as a person, based on the ethics of those who do the categorizing. And the phone call that just happened has… left him with some pieces of knowledge he would have easily done without. The scientists gently reminded him that he has been a nuisance since day one. That he should run back home and pray that this fixing is the one that sticks, finally.  
This is his last chance to meet the requirements for his continued existence. 

Here, in the Presidential residence of Esthar, where only Sora knows him for what he truly is, and if the Gods wish so he has already forgotten about it, too, everyone treats him like a person.   
Riku not only feels uncomfortable. He feels like a sham. 

“It went that bad?” Sora asks, giving him a supportive look. Maybe a touch pitying. Riku will take it anyway. Any acknowledgment is a blessing in itself. 

A blessing. Gods. Sora called him a blessing last night, that is a thing that definitely happened. Riku feel his lungs constrict just thinking about it. He wants to… He wants to extract the memories of the night and play them back forever.   
That happened. For real. He’s not imagining it. It’s not one of his stupid fantasies.   
It really, really happened. 

“Riku,” Sora calls him, worried now. He stands from his bed and his hands find Riku’s face and just— just the fact that he has been awake and active for this long is so much already. Sora’s touch makes him feel like a human being. A real human being. Even if he knows he’s not. Even if he knows he’s faking all of it. Has been programmed to fake all of it, for pretension’s sake. It wouldn’t do for people to know that Sephiroth’s team is conducting various pseudo-human experiments. And especially it wouldn’t do to let the other Really Important People know that the General would dare send half humans in his lieu. It would be seen as disrespectful.   
“It’s gonna be okay,” Sora tells him, cradling his cheeks.   
Riku is short-circuiting. 

He knows he’s not a robot or anything of the kind, but he’s still short-circuiting. He’s losing touch with a reality that doesn’t belong to him.   
He should be home, now. Being fixed. He should be home in his pod, getting the rest he needs for the next Really Important Gathering and… not here. Not here with Sora, feeling human and fantasizing about being real. 

“Yeah,” he forces himself to say. It’s hard and painful, but Sora is getting more and more worried and Riku doesn’t want that.  
That part of him so convinced of feeling human emotions wants just the exact opposite of that. “Yeah, no. I’m fine. It went well. Well enough,” he says, plastering the well trained smile on his face, the one that makes him look approachable and non-threatening, but also important and very much real. The same smile the General puts on for the cameras. The same smile that has been taught to him since activation, more or less. 

The call didn’t go well at all. The scientists are mad like Riku has never heard them before. They’re frantic. They want him back to the the Herd. They want him back home, now. As soon as possible. And they want to reprogram him, because obviously there is something wrong in his brain, something that shouldn’t have been there. Not a mistake on the scientist’s part, of course. It’s never a mistake on the scientist’s part.   
It’s always Riku, developing functions that shouldn’t be there in the first place. Functions that shouldn’t be possible. 

After all, he has been defective since conception, and the only reason he’s still here is because the General actually likes him. For some reason that he will never understand and will never be told, probably. 

The General is not a talkative man. He choose to keep Riku from beyond the Lab, never even speaking to him once. But he’s the closest thing Riku has to a father, and he has been taught to love him, so he does. And he represents at the best of his abilities. 

“You’re worrying me,” Sora says, his smile firmly in place but his eyes murky with thoughts. His hands are colder, now. Colder than they had been yesterday night. Colder than this morning, too. “Just a little. Are you tired?” 

Riku feels tired. He should have been put to rest a couple of hours ago. He’s not used to being sentient for so long at a time, but he has no way of telling Sora this, he has no way of telling him that sleep doesn’t cut it for him, not as he is, not with the life he has lived since now.   
“Yes,” he says, because lying is worse. Lying is a liability, a vulnerability, and Sora has trained eyes, sharp. And a trained heart, grown to recognize emotions.

Riku has studied Sora. Just like he has studied every guest of the Presidential Ball. He has been made to learn everything known about them.   
And Sora? Son of a Commander and a Sorceress and a villain? He’s been held under wraps, yes, but not enough for ShinRa to be in the dark about him. Not completely. 

Riku doesn’t know how to say any of this without being maimed. By Sora himself or by his sister or by their fathers.   
He deserves to be maimed by them, he thinks. He deserves it and it would be much, much easier than going back home, going back in the Lab for another reprogramming. But he has to go.   
For all their flaws and their easy anger, the scientists want just the best for him. They have invested a lot of effort, money and resources on him. 

“I think— I should go home,” he says, and he has never said anything more painful, more against his heart in his whole, miserable life. “Just for a little while.”

Sora’s smile freezes and his eyes turn icy, not unlike Leonhart’s. “Okay,” he says, very slowly, very calculated. “Okay. I’ll go with you.”

“No,” Riku snarls. The mere idea of Sora— No. No. “Absolutely not.”   
He would die.   
He would gladly kill himself before taking Sora anywhere close the scientist’s clutches. It’s not going to be up for debate. Not ever. 

Sora is nice. Riku doesn’t know much about him, hasn’t known him for long at all. But he can say Sora is nice, and no one nice deserves— all that.   
Sometimes Riku thinks he doesn’t deserve it either. And if he doesn’t, then surely Sora doesn’t. It’s very reasonable. It’s the right thing to do. Keep him as far away from he Herd as possible.   
He’s the first Sorcerer recorded in the history of their Planet. The scientist would put him in stasis and cut him open, study every inch of him, inside and out. Riku can’t let that happen. He needs to keep Sora safe. 

Keep him safe. His core wants this more than anything else. More than anything else Riku wants, too.   
Must be the newly acquired Knighthood, for sure. It’s just too overwhelming. It’s too bright a feeling, too real. It’s not inborn to him. It’s new and shining and powerful.

“I don’t think— look. I know… all this? I know it’s complete bullshit,” Sora says, stepping back and leaving Riku alone, functionally, in the room. Alone without his touch, alone without that point of focus, alone with his mind and his thoughts. “I’m really, really sorry, Riku. I didn’t do it on purpose. And I know you probably don’t want any part of it. But it’s not safe to be apart, right now. Not until the bond solidifies.”

There is not going to be a bond, as soon as he goes back home. It kills him to know that he’s taking magic away from Sora. It kills him from the inside out, rotting his organs and his cells and his core. It’s a reality he doesn’t want to actualize. He would rather let the scientist kill him than know he’s hurting Sora in anyway. But that, too, is the bond thinking for him, that, too, is not something inborn to himself. And it’s exactly the reason why they want him back to the Herd, why he needs reprogramming, he’s not stable and functional anymore. He needs fixing, and as quickly as possible, too. 

“That’s not it,” he says, even if he knows it would be easier if he just played along with Sora’s assumptions.   
He should just pretend that yesterday night has been nothing to him — as it should have been were he not such a failure — and that all of this is a real pain in the ass.   
He can’t, though. He can’t cause that much pain. It’s not in him. It wouldn’t be in him even if he were _right_. He’s modeled after the General, after all, and the General is not a cruel man. “Sora I— I like being here. I don’t mind being your Knight,” he says. Maybe it’s the bond talking through him, but he knows the words as true. “I just need to go home for a while.”

“But you can’t,” Sora insists, not a tantrum, no. He’s calm, calm as Riku could never be. Calm and sure of himself. “It would probably kill us both. Like, a very high probability. Let’s say a ninety—seven percentage of probability. You can leave, but I have to go with you. At least for some time.”

“I don’t want you to,” Riku tells him, no clearer way to put it than this. And he can see how it hurts Sora, but it’s definitely for his own good. And not the bullshit excuse people use, either. It’s one hundred percent for his own good, if Riku has to put it in percentage, since it seems to be something Sora approves of. “I’m— I need to go home and I need to go alone.”

“You don’t seem to get it, Riku,” Sora says, eyes narrowed, maybe close, now, to losing his patience. Riku hates having to do this but he knows it’s for the better of everyone involved. They won’t like it if the scientist came to get him back to the Herd. They wouldn’t like it one bit. And Riku refuses to put any of these people in such danger. Especially Sora. “We’re going to die, if you leave on your own. And I don’t know you, but I’m not just yet ready to leave this realm of existence. Yeah?”

“Not— Not yeah,” Riku says, and it’s really so fucking painful, he’s not going to ever breathe right again, after this. “Listen—”

“No,” Sora interrupts him, crossing his arms, his face twisting in a very, very angry expression. “You listen. I’m sorry. Really. But I will hold you here against your will if you keep fighting me on this. I do not want to die, I don’t know how to make it any clearer to you. I do not, under any circumstances, for any reason, want to fucking die. We can go to your home, yes, if you really need to go. But you will not kill me. Alright?”

“Sora, really, it’s just going to be for one day. And the bond won’t hold after that, so—”

“What the fuck are you on about? The bond is— okay. You don’t know shit about this so let me explain. The bond, it’s not something you can cut off. It’s not a flimsy of a moment. It’s not anyone’s decision but the magic’s, and magic is eternal and it doesn’t act on spur of the moment impulses. So if it chose you, it’s going to want you forever, and since now it has started to bond with you, it will never let you go. Am I making myself very clear, Riku? Are you understanding me?” Sora asks, like a bite, like a snap of vicious, poisonous jaws. 

Riku feels like he’s being chewed up and spitted out and then chewed some more. And he knows he deserves all of it, he knows, and he’s… okay with Sora hating him. It will be easier, in the long run. He knows all of this. 

And still. He wants Sora to know the truth. “I’m a clone, Sora. I told you yesterday but I don’t know if you remember, and. They will reprogram me when I get home. I was called back because I’m defective and I need to be fixed. And being your Knight is— it’s not what I was made for. It’s what’s gonna get fixed— They’ll revert me to… uh… the factory settings, so to speak” his voice breaks, multiple times, and he can see Sora getting more and more ashen as he understands what Riku is saying and he hates having to say it aloud, he hates having to make Sora look like that and he hates being what he is. 

But it is the truth of this situation. And he can’t lie. He has not been programmed to lie. The General never lies. The General knows how to keep secrets, which has never been taught to Riku because he needs to tell everything always, whenever he’s asked.   
And he can’t keep this a secret, no matter how much he would like to. 

Sora puts a fist over his mouth, just like Leonhart dis yesterday. But where Leonhart’s eyes had been glacial and calculating, Sora’s are full of unshed tears and disgust. Riku… Riku understands. It hurts, but he understands. “You’re not going to die,” he reassures, his throat raw and his voice rough. He forces himself to smile through it and Sora closes his eyes. 

“Stop that,” he orders. Riku sighs. He doesn’t know what to do now. He can’t make it better because… it’s just the truth. And he doesn’t know what to do beyond that. “You’re not going home,” Sora says, a sob tearing from him. “You’re not going. Listen. I don’t give a fuck, okay. You’re staying here. What— what the fuck is wrong with your people?” he says, tars streaming down his cheeks. He looks like a wreck, and some of it reverberates against Riku’s core. It’s pure desperation. Pure sickness, too. Emotions so clean, so real. Riku has never felt anything like this in his life. Never before now.   
Sora cries and Riku can feel how painful it is, how tight his chest is, how full of rage and disbelief his Sorcerer is. And he wants to fix it but he can’t. There is no fixing the truth.   
It’s just the truth. 

—*—

Sora rages. He doesn’t know what else to do.   
This is the way he deals with things too much bigger than himself, things he can’t rationalize, things he doesn’t understand.   
He rages, because it’s easier, in a way. Because he feels like he will die if he doesn’t. 

He cries, too. He despairs. He tries not to, because it’s always worse, but he can’t help it.   
There is nothing about this whole thing that doesn’t make him sick to his soul. He has nothing left in his stomach to retch out, though, and now he all he loses are tears and the occasional scream. 

He doesn’t even know what he thought Riku meant when he said he’s a clone. He definitely didn’t think this is what he meant, though. He’s sure of it, if of nothing else. He thought it cool, in a very sci-fi way. Cool like spaceships are cool, like robots are cool, like bio-hacking is cool. Not like—   
Not like this. Like this breeding of humans programmed to be in a certain way. And most of all not— whatever Riku has been implying. Not defections that needs fixing through reprogramming procedures. 

Riku is never going back.   
He is not sure of anything, right now, bar from this.   
Riku is not ever going back there. 

“Sora,” his dad calls him, standing in the doorway and not daring get any closer to the sheer destruction Sora has brought upon the room. There is nothing else he has control on, right now, and he needs to exercise at least that little control he has or he will go insane. “I know how terrible this is,” his dad says, but Sorta knows it to be a lie. There is no way dad knows how terrible this is. This is— this is sick beyond comprehension. 

“You— Leon can do something about this, right?” Sora asks, hating how shaky his voice is, his whole being is. “You can do something, right?”

“Yes,” his dad says, taking one single step closer. “Your father is already working on it. It will take some time, but we are going to do something about it.”

“We’re burning the place down,” Xion says, stepping beside their dad and coming to Sora, unfazed by his rage, never scared of him, never weaker than him, never shaken. Xion is strong. Xion is exactly the person Sora needs right now, and she accepts him in her arms and squeezes him tight. As tight as he can take. “You and me, Sora,” she whispers at him, so wrathful and so sweet. “We’re unstoppable together. We’re Gods. And we’re taking it all down.” Sora nods against her shoulder and squeezes back, just as tight as she is, and it’s cathartic. It’s all he needed, really. 

“Kids, no. You’re not getting close to that place,” their dad says, like he believes he can stop them at all, like he thinks they will listen. 

—

Calmer now, after a long, long rest and Xion’s words, Sora feels like he won’t go out of his mind if he sees Riku. And the magic needs him close, anyway. The further away they are from each other, the flimsier their sanity is. And Sora has no wishes to lose his mind before punishing whomever made Riku… made him think like that.   
Sora won’t dwell on it anymore. Not yet.   
He needs as much tranquility as he can get for this. 

Riku himself is not very at ease, right now, and Sora will not make it worse for him. He will not make his feelings a burden for his Knight to bear. He refuses to be that kind of Sorcerer and that kind of person. 

He knocks on the door and waits. Riku will let him in. He never turns anyone away, or so Leon says. He has probably been programmed to do so. But that’s not something Sora should think about just yet.   
Riku will let him in and they will spend some time together. And it will be alright. Sora wills it to be alright.   
He’s ready to try as many times as he needs to, to make it alright.

Riku opens the door, a small, polite smile on his face. It gets brighter and suddenly dimmer as he sees Sora and then realizes what his presence means.   
Sora smiles back, as shining and as wide as he can. It’s not that hard. His magic is very pleased with Riku’s closeness, and the giddiness won’t leave, no matter how much Sora thinks of the ugly reality of things. The magic is happy, and it wants Sora to be happy. “Hello,” he says, refraining from reaching out. 

“Hello, Sora,” Riku says, moving from the door and inviting him inside. Sora goes, and sits down at the desktop chair, and he looks around at the room. “Do you need something?” Riku asks, his awkwardness palpable, both in the air and in Sora’s core. They’re getting attuned. More and more as the hours pass them by. Soon, Sora will be able to slip in his mind, if he so wishes. He won’t. Not ever, not unless Riku asks him to. But he will have the ability to.   
And after that… they will meld together, for a while. So Leon says. They will be one entity. For some time. It could be an hour or it could be a week, usually not more than that. 

And after the melding, they will be stable. Two people, forever connected, stronger and happier for it, one in the service of the other.   
And everything will be better, because Sora will make it be better. He will not take anything else. 

“I just wanted to spend some time with you, if you want,” he says, keeping his smile in place, assured by its realness. Riku can probably see through his lies, or feel them, by now. Sora knows he’s feeling much more than his own emotions, anyway. And it’s not his hyper-empathy acting up. 

“Sure,” Riku says, sitting on his bed, in front of Sora. 

There are so many questions he wants to ask, so many reassurances he wants to give, so many promises he wants to make. But he keeps all of them inside. They would burden Riku, saddle him down with thoughts and worries. And Riku needs none of it. None of it from Sora and none of it from anyone else. Not ever. “We could go and see the city, if you like. It’s really pretty. Like you.”

Riku blushes and smiles, his eyes turning down on the ground. “Flattery will get you anywhere, really,” he says, and it’s a joke. It’s lighthearted and nice to hear, and Sora is hit with the realization, again, that Riku is comfortable in his— in everything he is. He knows nothing else. He doesn’t think himself an obvious, tragic violation of human rights. He’s just himself. And Sora will not bother him about it. He refuses to. “But I’m tired, Sora. I don’t think I can get out, right now. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Sora says, smiling brighter because he thinks it will help. Because he fears Riku fears refusing him, because he has no idea why Riku has been reprogrammed before, what are the reasons his butchers have used to shame him into another round of mindfuckery over the years. And he won’t ask about it.   
He won’t because soon they will mind-meld together and he will know anyway, but even if they weren’t going to, he wouldn’t ask. He doesn’t want to know, and he doubts Riku wants to talk about it, anyway. Sora has felt, loud and clear and painfully, how hard it has been for Riku to tell him that little he has. He won’t force anything more out of him. 

“I’m glad you’re not as upset as you were yesterday,” Riku says, wringing his hands and not looking up at Sora. “I’m really sorry for that, I didn’t think it would hurt you like that.”

Sora has to swallow the tears that want to build up inside his eyes. He has to focus on the unassuming peace and contentedness of his magic. On its happiness, even, born out of Riku’s closeness, of his own magic singing back, so soft and quite that even Sora strains to hear it. “No, I’m sorry,” he says. “I lost my composure big time. I told you I’m not great with people,” he jokes.   
He needs to remind himself that all of this is normal for Riku, and as such he will treat him as he would anyone else. He will not make him feel like he’s being handled with more care than deserved. He will not make him feel like fragile goods.

“Yeah,” Riku says, a real smile on his face, but still his eyes won’t meet Sora’s. He’s okay with it. Well, he’s not, not really, but he will deal with it. “Yeah it shows. But I don’t mind.”

Sora wonders, and he tries not to, he really does, how much of that is true and how much is conditioning. He wants to know the real person even if he already does. He knows Riku is this. One hundred percent. He knows he’s real just like he is. But it feels wrong. It feels like it’s not enough. And he hates himself for feeling like this, and he hates whomever has done this to his Knight. 

Xion’s promises echoes in his ears, as sweet as honey, and as comforting as nothing else will ever be. 

—

Leon doesn’t bother knocking, and Sora doesn’t bother scolding him about it. Leon has been— he has been great, actually, he has been exactly what Sora has needed him to be. Solid, stable. A pillar to lay against. And Sora is more grateful than ever, more grateful than he can express. He accepts Leon’s presence in his room like never before, and his father must notice because he is more relaxed now. These last couple of days they have silently agreed to put a screen over the wrinkles in their relationship, to pretend they have smoothed over, and they have reached a sort of peaceful understanding. 

Sora is ready to listen. He is ready to do whatever Leon tells him to, as long as it isn’t to stay away from his Knight’s butchers, because that’s a promise he can’t grant, and Leon knows perfectly well. 

“Esthar isn’t safe anymore,” Leon tells him, and Sora nods, not even thinking about it. Yes, Esthar isn’t safe for them. For Riku. Yes, they need to move. Yes he is ready to. “I know some people that can shield us, for a while.”

“Where?” Sora asks him, not really interested, not really caring as long as it will be safer for Riku. As safe as it can be. 

“It’s called Radiant Garden. It’s overseas.”

“Okay,” Sora says, and some part of him, still focused on the day to day life, still attached somehow, in some way, to his young age and young priorities, hates the idea of uprooting his life once again, so soon after coming to Esthar. He squashes that part of himself down, reminding himself in a very fucking clear way that Riku is in danger, and nothing, absolutely nothing, will ever be more important than his Knight. Nothing will be ever be able to matter more or just as much as Riku does, to him and his magic. 

Soon he will be ready and glad to lay down his life in favor of his Knight’s safety.  
Moving is nothing, compared to it.   
“When are we leaving?”

—

Riku is not happy, boarding the Ragnarok. Sora feels it in his core. Behind his usual smile, Riku is so very not happy about all this. Sora holds his hand tight and sits next to him for the journey, commenting idly on the constellations shining above them, on the galaxies lighting their way, on every little thing that catches his eye.   
Riku doesn’t necessarily listen to all of it, he knows, but he feels the comfort his voice brings him, and he keeps talking in quiet tones, in soft murmurs, and he feels Riku slipping down into sleep like if it were himself, and for a minute or two he is sleeping, too, with his eyes wide open, and he’s awake, but in a different body, staring at the stars. 

It marks the start of the mind-meld. It starts slow, with little snaps out of each other’s eyes. It starts with little and it builds up quickly.   
Sora can’t wait for the fullness of it, for the moment he will be as complete as he will never be again, as he will always be forever-after.

“Sora,” Xion calls him, and for one instant her voice is a functional stranger’s voice, and her sight doesn’t bring him any comfort, any joy.   
For a moment he barely recognizes her, despite Xion sharing his face and his whole being. “Come on. Family talk.”

He gets up, unstable on asleep legs, weak, relying on asleep muscles.   
He sleeps, peaceful as he can be with everything going on, so far from home and so, so much a failure, every second that passes he gets worse. 

Xion holds his arm, her touch familiar and needed, and he leans into her and he doesn’t need to spell it out to her. He never has. Xion understands him, and he understand her, and they are, too, one and together. They are one split in two halves, and they are together. They are Gods. 

He leans into her and she leans into him and they are safe in each other’s hold. Safe as he has never been, complete as he has never felt. And terribly alone, and terribly scared, and defective to the marrow. 

“We’re melding,” Sora says, to the cockpit at large, to his fathers, to Xion. Xion knows, already, she sees it in his eyes as they go in and out of focus, but their dads are too busy with piloting to notice.

“It’s going to be weird, at first,” Leon says, not taking his eyes off the route. There aren’t many obstacles along the way, but one is enough to fuck them up beyond repair.   
He has been on a spaceship before, he knows how it works. 

Except that Sora has never boarded one and he has no idea how any of this work. And the mind-meld, despite how much he wants it, needs it, will be a colossal pain in the ass. 

“Yeah, I noticed,” he says, as blithe as he can with his thoughts all jumbled together like they are. 

“Don’t worry about it. Just let it do its course,” Leon says, and it’s incredibly reassuring. The Commander’s presence is reassuring. His father. His father’s presence. 

“Sit,” Xion tells him, guiding him to an empty chair. He sits and his eyes want to lull closed, his mind wants to separate from reality for a moment. He wants to sleep. 

“The people I told you about,” Leon starts, clenching his hands on the steering shaft. “They’re old friends of mine. And of General Crescent’s.”

Sora stiffens, all his muscles tense with coiled terror, his heart mellow with affection, his mind a complete mess. “They’re not selling us out,” he says, more to himself — the both of himself — and to his family. He knows Leon wouldn’t put him in danger. He knows that as he knows the sun rises in the morning. He knows as certainty, pure and simple. 

“They’re not. But it’s your right to know. They will shield us from them for as long as they can.”

“I trust you,” Sora says, and it’s the first time he has ever told his father this, the first time this has been a truth in his life, and Leon’s shoulders relax, his eyes turn to him, for the barest of seconds, and he smiles at Sora with love in his eyes.   
And Sora smiles back. 

“Thank you,” Leon says, and he means it. He means it so much. Sora mourns, in a very peculiar way, all the years he has spent hating his father. He needed those, he has needed them to the last second, but he mourns all those lost chances, all the missed opportunities, all the affection he hasn’t given, hasn’t gotten. 

—*—

Radiant Garden sings like a siren. It’s magical in the purest sense of the word. Sora-and-Riku remembers it from many years ago, when they-he was still too young to be sent on missions, when they-he was still being trained. They-he didn’t know its name, back then, but the magic is unmistakable, the architecture unique.   
They-he was but a child, and a wave of griefs crashes into them-him.   
It hurts, it hurts and it’s incomprehensible and it feels. Wrong. All of their-his childhood feels wrong, feels like a betrayal of something holy, like sickness and torture. But they-he remembers it fondly, too. They-he was young, and full of wonders and full of will to learn, to become perfect, to serve their-his purpose. 

Their-his body hold hands together as they-he walk the familiar-never seen before roads, seeing the city through two pair of eyes, focusing on so many different things at a time, feeling so completely in awe of everything.  
  
It’s all new. It’s familiar but it’s all new. And it’s never before seen but it feels like home, in a way. 

Xion holds their-his other hand, one of them, and her touch, too is familiar and new, and her smile is bright and known and wonderful. It puts them-him at ease, like water in a very hot summer day, like soothing paste on a bruise, like well earned praise.   
“I’ll guide you,” she tells them-him, and they-he feels safe, safe in Radiant Garden when it has never been safe, safe in this moment, fear threatening to smother them-him in its merciless grasp. Xion is grace and power, all in one. She is potential. She is a God. Together they are unstoppable. 

Leon-the Commander-Father leads the way, and dad closes their line, forever the protector — the villain — the _redeemed_. And Xion guides them-him, her steps slow but sure, they all walk sure behind the Commander-Father. They all trust him with no reserves. He is— he is. Hated and feared and revered and loved. He is confusing, in a way. They-he doesn’t dwell on it. 

Sora doesn’t dwell on things he rather be left alone, and Riku doesn’t dwell on things that hurt his Sorcerer in ways he can’t understand and in a way Sora-and-Riku is one in this too, they-he understand himself-each other in this, too, even if the sentiments are opposite and even if the sentiments are the same. 

Leon guides them all with a close eye to them at his back and a sure step. He knows this place too, he knows where to go. And Riku-and-Sora knows where they-he is going. 

Aerith Gainsborough is a lovely lady.   
She has always, always been. She is powerful like the Planet, like a Goddess in her own way. She is Cetra, sure as day even if it has never been said out loud. She is Cetra and she is to be trusted.   
Sora-and-Riku exhale the breath they-he has been holding. The fear seeping out of their-his coiled muscles.   
Aerith is a good woman. Good like the flowers are, like the oxygen is, like fresh, clean water is.   
She is repentance. 

She has always tried to help. 

She opens the door as they all approach her house, and her smile is sweet but full of pain. She hugs the Commander-Father to herself, like she’s his only, last lifeline and she will do her best to bring him ashore. 

She turns to them all, and her eyes are full of grief. “Babies,” she says, coming forward to hug the three-two of them, keeping the Riku body for last, she cradles his-their face in her soft, small hands, her eyes shiny with tears. “I’m so sorry. I should have done more,” she tells him-them, kissing their-his forehead. 

“Don’t worry,” they-he tells them, and some part of them-him wonders how weird this must be, from the outside. How weird it is from the inside, too. “You couldn’t have helped. You can barely help now,” they-he says, bringing a hand to their-his chest, as if to indicate a defection in the heart. 

Not a defection. Never a defection. This is perfect. 

“They’re mind-melding,” Seifer-dad explains, getting his own hug and all. Sora-and-Riku, or a part of them-him, is glad to see him included, for once, with no effort and no fanfare. It’s what he deserves. He will always be a villain in the eyes of the people. He is redeemed. He has been paying penance. He is done with pain.   
He has hurt many. 

And so have others, and this thought, a bulb just about to blossom in their-his mind, calls forth many images of childhood. Not only from the Radiant Garden, but from the Labs, from the Balamb Garden, from the Herd. They’re painful memories, all of them, and all of them regarded with fondness, all of them understood with a clarity not granted to singular parts of them-him.   
They are, most of all, a source of extremely confused feelings, and they-he let them go, for the moment, swift as the whole stream of memories has been swift till now, swift as their-his thoughts have been. Immaterial.

“I supposed so,” Aerith says, her smile like a light shining through the darkness, so bright as to hurt their-his eyes. “Come in, please. Everyone’s eager to meet you.”

—*—

Xion tries her best not to find the mind-meld fucking creepy as all the Abyss and beyond.   
She does. She holds onto Sora’s hand and hopes it will be swift and quickly done with. She misses her brother, already. She misses him as the real person, not as this weird… being he is right now. One third himself, one third Riku and one third something else entirely.   
She doesn’t want to go through this. She would rather stay Knight-less, honestly.   
She appreciates her singularity. Her person-hood. Her being as she is. 

Seifer holds her shoulder as they loiter in Aerith Gainsborough’s living room, too awkward to join Leon in the kitchen, too unsettled to stay next to Sora and Riku during their very special bonding time. “It will pass very soon, sweetie,” he says, some sort of hope in his voice. Xion knows he feels just like her. Weirded out. Not unsympathetic, not ever against it, but completely weirded out. Maybe it’s the intimacy of it, something they should never look at, something so personal and pure they shouldn’t defile it with their sight. Maybe that’s the reason they feel so uncomfortable.

“I just— don’t want any part of that,” Xion tells him, in no roundabout way. Seifer nods at her, full of understanding.

“I know. Trust me, I didn’t either. But it looks different from the inside. It feels— it’s something else. And you will need it, if you ever find your Knight.”

The thing neither he nor Leon have the balls to accept is, Xion doesn’t need a Knight. She has never needed one, not since the day she was born. Her magic is an ouroboros. Feeding into itself in an endless circle. She is balanced. She is flawless. She doesn’t need a counterpoint and she doesn’t need a chorus.   
She is on her own and she stands solid and tall and proud. 

She wants a Knight, undoubtedly. She wants someone that will forever be at her side, sure as day, sure as… Sure as Sora, but hers and only hers, forever. She wants that more than anything else.   
But she doesn’t want all that, she thinks, staring at her brother and wondering where he is, what he’s seeing, what he’s feeling. If this is everything he has ever hoped his Knight would be. 

And she has known, clear as anything, since the day she has seen Sora lash out and destroy his room and everything in his path, that her twin cares about Riku more than he will ever care for another human being, ever.   
She knows this, and she is glad for him. She is thankful to Hyne and all his servants for granting Sora this blessing. 

But she’s jealous. For the first time in her life she is jealous and unsure of where she stands in regards to her brother.   
Wonders if they will ever be as close as they used to be, if he will love her the same, understand her the same, trust her the same. 

“I don’t want any of that,” she repeats, some hidden corner of herself shaking in fear and uncertainty and loneliness. Sora can’t come back quickly enough. 

—

The Radiant Garden is beautiful.   
Xion has informed her fathers and her brother-and-his-Knight that she was going out. She can’t stay put in a house that small for too long without completely losing her shit, and all of them know this and grant her freedom, as long as she keeps out of trouble. 

The Radiant Garden is lovely, and Aerith Gainsborough is lovely, and the house is lovely.   
Everything is great, if not for the storm brewing in Xion’s stomach, the fear gripping her inside like it’s a sport, the uncertainty corroding her from the inside out. 

She needs an open space, right now, somewhere from where to see the entirety of the town, somewhere where she can be alone and amongst everyone at the same time. Somewhere where she can loses herself in the lives bustling through the streets and filling up the central plaza. 

A blonde girl looks at her, eyes so light they look white, a look on her like prayer. Like redemption. Xion stares back until it becomes awkward, and she offers a smile, as polite as she can make it while her emotions flare up in every direction, while everything loses meaning and she stops knowing what places she occupies in the universe. 

Sora will be back, she tells herself.   
Sora will be back and will be Sora and he will love her the same. They will be the same. Gods, unstoppable. Together.   
They’re twins, after all, they have never need to meld minds to understand each other down to the bones. And they will never need one in the years that follow. They will forever be like this. 

Xion, her guard up half in fear of the new place and half out of habit, notices the blonde girl following her steps with her weird eyes. She tries her best to ignore it.  
Maybe she is just curious.   
Not everything has to be a threat all the time, and in small towns is normal for the residents to be curious about new people.   
Xion’s just as paranoid as her dads are. As Sora is. 

She needs to get up on a roof. That always helps calming her down. 

With no fear of getting lost, Xion adventures in every little alley she can find, feeling eyes on her back and jaws at her front, ready to swallow her up at the smallest of mistakes. She feels fucking trapped. 

It’s not a feeling she can appreciate, not by any stretch of the word. She materializes her wings, they don’t hurt too much as they spring from her bones, flesh turning to steel feathers, preexisting limbs changing ever so slightly to accommodate for the spans of her new ones, and she climbs the closest wall to her, helping herself to the top with nothing more than panic and need to her name. 

The girl is staring at her, she sees. Still. She has followed Xion to the alley, and now her head is turned upwards, her eyes so focused on Xion’s she can feel them in her own, pupils against pupils. It’s unsettling, to say the least. 

“What do you want?” Xion mouths at her, keeping the curling of her lips at bay. It wouldn’t do to make this even more difficult, after all. Her dad always say that diplomatic resolution is the best option, whenever possible.   
There’s no reason to turn this into a bloodshed. Not even if Xion is sure she could take this girl anytime, anywhere. 

“Just want to talk,” the girls says, her voice whispering straight into Xion’s ear. 

A magical, then. Good to know. Xion imitates her, and invites her voice to flow closer to the blonde. “Not much for conversation. What’s this about?”

“Aerith. You’re her guest.”

“Who wants to know?” Xion asks, her teeth showing. She won’t turn this into a physical attack unless the girl really wants her to. And she seems very much interested, as far as Xion is concerned. 

“Naminé. Aerith knows me. I just want to help. Please.”

“Plead as you will, I can’t grant you shit.”

The girl lowers her head, almost a nod. Almost a bow. Dejection written all over her. “Very well,” she says. Her last words before parting from Xion, leaving her to her freedom, her contemplation of the skyline, her solitary moment of reprise. 

Very well, Xion thinks. Good riddance. And no bloodshed. Her fathers better be proud of her for all her patience. She has enough to supply the rest of her family for their entire lives, honestly. 

—

“Ms. Gainsborough,” Xion calls as she enters the house. It’s small, but lovely. Just like its owner.   
If Xion didn’t suffer from claustrophobia she would love it to bits. As it stands…. Well. She is going to stand a couple months in here, as long as she has free access to the outside world. And the rooftop.   
No more than that. Any more than a couple of months would be pushing it on her psyche, would be asking her just a little too much. 

“Yes, dear?” Ms. Gainsborough says, poking her head from the hallway door. “Something amiss?” 

“Do you know a girl named Naminé?” Xion asks, thinking about the girl and feeling some… upset feelings move around inside her. 

“Yes,” Ms. Gainsborough says, a smile opening on her face, taking ten years off her face. “She is… kind of my apprentice. Hope she hasn't bothered you?” 

Xion mulls it over for a moment. In the end, she decides the truth is better than anything else she could offer. That, and Ms. Gainsborough is offering sanctuary for her and her family. She deserves the truth.   
“Nothing tragic. But she has followed me for maybe ten minutes. You may want to let her know that someone less well-trained than I am could have taken that as a threat and acted accordingly,” Xion says, as peaceful as she can make her voice sound. As tranquil as she knows how. 

“Oh,” Ms. Gainsborough says, a hand on her heart like the ladies in old movies. “That's my fault. Please forgive her. She meant no harm. I just asked her to keep an eye on my guests, but I didn’t mean it… quite like that.” 

“Surely hope not,” Xion says, some tension leaving her back. Her shoulders can almost relax, now. Or they will as soon as she gets her brother back. Her brother as he should be.   
She knows Sora is there. She knows and she’s grateful. In a way, she is also very happy about his mind-melding.   
She just misses him. They have never been apart, not one day of their lives. 

She misses having him there, as a singular entity, and she misses his voice, now echoed. And she misses his looks, now focused on the inside, his eyes almost empty. 

The door opens again, at her back, and in steps Naminé, stopped in her tracks with a slack mouth. “I— I’ll come back later,” she says, sheepish and embarrassed, her pale cheeks tinted rose. 

“We'll be here, later,” Xion tells her, not as unkind as she would have told anyone else in Naminé’s shoes. The girl just looks so... ashamed of the whole ordeal. Some slack must be cut. 

“Oh,” she says, scratching the back of her head, on her lips a smile. “I’ll be here when you’ve left, then. Aerith, sorry for the trouble I’ve caused.”

“You can stay,” Xion tells her. “As long as Ms. Gainsborough doesn’t mind. Obviously. It’s not my house."

“Call me Aerith, darling,” Ms. Gainsborough says. Xion has no intention of calling her Aerith. It’s just not proper. “And of course, you can stay, Nami, but we are going to review your approaching techniques. It wouldn’t do to make our guests paranoid without reason, now. Would it?”

“No,” Naminé concedes, looking dutifully scolded even if Ms Gainsborough’s tone has been nothing but sweetness, with barely a hint of the softest reproach.  
Xion is…. Not used to people like Ms. Gainsborough. Soft spoken, soft mannered; soft all around.   
She's not so sure she will like it here, after all. 

—

“Hey,” Naminé says, and she, too, is soft spoken and soft mannered and soft all around. Xion wonders how her life ended up like this. Surrounded by a soft kindness she can barely understand.   
In Balamb, kindness has always been a harsh thing. Kindness has come in the shape of avoidance. People moving to make room for her in the hallways, respectful out of fear; teachers pretending not to see her when she bandaged her wounds and when she slept in their class and when she was less than perfect.   
Kindness has come in the shape of understanding, too, the same understanding that runs amongst soldiers. Understanding her pride, her solitude, her power. 

This— This coddling has never been part of her life. Not from Sora, not from dad, especially not from Leon. 

“Hey,” she says back, since it’s the polite thing to do, but her voice could never sound as Naminé’s does.

“Sorry for… that,” Naminé says. She possesses the kind of magic that sounds like vocalizing. Like it’s trying to find its voice, still. Not fully formed, or maybe far away. 

“Done and gone. Nothing to worry about,” Xion says, shrugging her shoulders.   
Sora sits at her side and he’s not moving, not really. He’s staring around, his eyes going in every direction, fluttering like little birds, and Riku does the same, on the other side of her brother, and she feels so fucking uncomfortable next to them, but she can’t leave them alone. Especially not now that the adults are having their little talk. 

“I was just trying—”

“I said,” Xion interrupts her, trying to mimic a tone that won’t upset her, feeling too brash and too hard-edged and too wrong in this place, “It’s done and gone. I don’t need explanations.”

Naminé chews on her lower lip and nods at her, uncomfortable, too, just like Xion but not for the same reasons, and not offended. Which is very good because Xion hates inadvertently insulting people. It’s just not done, not in her blood. “Okay,” Naminé says, shuffling on her feet. “I’m making coffee. Do you want some?”

“Please,” Xion tells her.   
Yes. Coffee sounds marvelous right now. Between the journey here and the stalking and the smallness of Radiant Garden… if her mind doesn’t get caffeinated in just about now she will lose it. 

—

The table is barely large enough to sit all of them, and even if there is a chair put out for her, Xion stands, against the wall of the kitchen, keeping an eye on the living room and sipping her coffee. Trying not to listen to the chit-chat currently happening, trying to ignore her parents’ worried glances, trying to ignore the whole world, if she can manage.

She can’t wait for Sora’s return. She is getting itchy, awaiting. She hates waiting for things. 

Leon huffs, and that’s new. Xion turns to find he has been elbowed in the ribs. The man doing the elbowing is an old friend, so she has been told. Cid Highwind, starship builder, retired soldier, all around rough and gruff like her parents, like her. Him, she can understand.

“Xion, would you like to sit with us?” Leon asks her, the voice of a man scolded. Xion smirks at him, because it’s what she does. Because teasing him and pissing him off is how she shows affection. 

“I’m fine,” she says, raising her cup in Highwind’s direction. 

“They’re not going anywhere, kid,” the man tells her, his voice consumed by too much smoke. 

“And nor am I. I’m fine,” she says, her eyes turning back to her brother and his Knight, still on the couch, still lost in their mind-meld, still unavailable. 

“Leave her alone,” dad interjects, and they reprise their talk, Xion blissfully ignored like she favors. Naminé’s eyes stay on her, almost glued to her back.   
Xion thinks she might go for a walk.   
And maybe she will have a talk with Naminé. This staring business needs to be put to rest for real. 

Sora and Riku perks their heads up at the same time. They look at her, two pair of eyes that show exactly the same emotion. “Xi,” they say, together, like— like a fucking horror movie, honestly. Xion keeps her shivers from breaking over her skin. Reminds herself this is nice, in Sora’s perspective. This is what he needs and, most importantly, what he wants. “Come sit with us,” they say, and Xion almost laughs at them. It’s so fucking creepy. 

She wants none of it. Complete bullshit, honestly.   
But she goes and sits with them, compliant. She has nothing better to do. 

“How are you?” only Sora’s voice ask her, but she would never believe him for her brother.

“Good enough,” she says, comfortable in her armchair, staring at the two of them, sitting like statues one next to the other. She wonders, even if she doesn’t want to, what’s going on in their minds. In their mind, singular now, melded together.   
She wonders how it feels like, even if it makes her skin crawl, even if she starts suffocating only thinking about it. 

She wouldn’t put a stop to it even if she could. Of this Xion is one hundred percent sure.   
She wouldn’t take this away from Sora, no matter her feelings about it. Because, and she keeps reminding this to herself because she has to, Sora is happy about this. Sora is living his dream. 

Sora, forever cut off from his magic, finally has a way of making it his, of being complete. And she can be uncomfortable, she can be jealous about it, jealous of him and envious of Riku for being the one to grant her brother that fulfillment, but she can’t ruin it for him, for the both of them. 

“Let’s— Why don’t we—” Sora’s body starts, interrupts himself, starts again. His eyes confused, Riku’s eyes just as confused. Perturbed, almost. Xion raises her eyebrow at the both of them and sips her coffee. “Outside,” Sora says, nodding to himself, and Riku’s body nods too, they both putting on a proud smile. 

“With you like that? Um,” Xion says. 

“With _you_ like _that_ ,” Riku’s body snaps at her, and that’s a lot more Sora-like than anything else they have done and said since the beginning of the mind-meld, and Xion laughs at them, her chest getting warm and tight.

“Nah, it’s fine,” she says, crossing her legs and reclining back in the armchair. Her back is killing her, the Ragnarok has been cool as anything but definitely not a comfortable ride.   
Sora and Riku both stare at her, it’s a very familiar look, on her brother’s face. Less familiar on his Knight’s, but she accepts it. It’s better than nothing. It’s better than the fear of losing Sora forever, better than the chewing terror of never having the same bond with him that has glued them together since the day of their birth. “Shut up,” she tells them, unable to hide the smile from her voice, to hide it from her face, too. 

—

Insomnia is a beloved sister to Xion. Nocturnal creature that she is. She enjoys the silence of the house, the pretend solitude of the living room, the darkness cradling her like a mother would a child.   
She enjoys a touch less the eyes stapled to her, still unmoving, still not leaving her back, even in their silence.   
That, she can’t enjoy at all. She’s one step away from losing her cool, and she would rather not ruin this stay for all her family, honestly.   
She will, if Naminé doesn’t stop stalking her with her looks, but she would rather it not come to that. 

“What’’s your deal?” she asks, mostly directed to the window, but Naminé knows Xion knows she’s there. She’s not exactly being subtle about— whatever she’s doing. Whatever she is expecting. Whatever she wants. 

Xion is tired. Tired and cranky and wanting nothing more than sleep. It won’t come, though, and she accepts her sleepless night like she has accepted countless before it. 

“Nothing,” Naminé says, her voice startled and breathy. “Nothing, sorry. I just— Sorry.”

Xion turns to her, finds her half hidden in the shadows of the doorway, half shining in moonlight. She looks… Curious. Curious and frightened and worried. “You’re bothering me,” Xion says and she hopes this will be easy enough to understand for Naminé. 

“I’m sorry,” the girl insists, her softness unraveling like wool. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Yeah. Me neither.” Xion, though, contrary to Naminé, knows perfectly well what’s going to be wrong with her if she doesn’t stop with her staring. She doesn’t say this aloud. Threatening people is crass. She would rather not resort to that.   
But this is exactly what she was thinking about earlier. No one in Balamb would have treated her like this.   
In Balamb everyone understands the need for avoidance and solitude and the kindness intrinsic in refusing to acknowledge people. 

No soldier would have ever behaved like this towards her, and Xion, maybe for the very first time ever, misses the Balamb Garden, misses her SeeD companions, her classmates, her teachers. 

“You’re singing,” Naminé says, her words unsure. “I’m just trying to understand.” 

“I’m singing,” Xion repeats, a sigh just ready to seep through her lips. This is new, at least. “Look, truth hour—” more like, truth two minutes, but it’s whatever, “— You keep it up, I’m going to beat you up. We clear?”

“Wow,” Naminé says, and Xion can’t see it but she knows the girl is rolling her eyes at her. The nerve, seriously. “Military life really can’t make up for manners.”

“Yeah,” Xion agrees with her. “So how’s about you leave me alone?”

“I would love to, but your magic is singing to me, so I would rather understand what it wants.”

“We don’t want anything,” Xion says, and she is pretty sure of the truth of her words even if… well. Even if she hasn’t checked in on her magic for a couple days now. She’s pretty sure it doesn’t want anything, though, or it would have made it perfectly clear to her. 

Naminé glares at the floor in between them and chews on her lip. “That’s a lie,” she says.   
Xion rolls her eyes, hoping the girl will notice and pretty sure she won’t, at the same time. In honor of sanctuary and the debt she owes Ms. Gainsborough, she focuses on her magic.   
She has needed years of practice and endless hours wasted on meditation, but she can connect to it at the drop of a hat, by now. 

And okay, yes, her magic is whining about something. It craves. It strains against its borders. Xion pokes at it, trying to get some more detailed explanation. 

“Okay, yeah” she says, out loud, her voice probably dreamy like it always gets when she’s communing. “That is a lie.” But whatever it is that it wants… well. She can’t say. It can’t say either. One little part of her magic is confused and upset and lamenting… loneliness? 

_Oh._

Xion knows what the reasonable explanation for that is. She knows.   
Admitting it, even to herself is… a bit harder. Especially now.   


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact, I've written the first two chapters in one day. I tried to go for 20k in 20 hours and I did it. My sleep schedule hasn't been the same since. Don't be like me, lmao


	3. Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to keep updating this on a semi regular, biweekly schedule but... life kicked my ass. So... here's the third chapter! And I think i can post the fourth in an hour or so... hopefully, so keep an eye out for that too.

It turns out that there is something worse than being without Sora-as-himself.  
And yes, she has tangible proof, now, that her brother is still there, still hers and still unchanged, even if momentarily busy with something much more pressing and all-consuming. 

There are many worse things than this but, most of all, there is freaking out without her brother at her side, taking the burnt of it and understanding her without words and comforting her.  
There is the unwanted, unasked for loneliness. There is the panic that doesn’t find the usual buffer that she has had all her life. 

And there is her parents' concern. For her onlyness and her silence and her too vigilant eyes. Her twitchiness.  
It’s a discomfort that she has never had to take care of by herself. Sora has always been there, and yes he is here now, too, but this time it's— it's just different. It’s worse. 

“Xi,” Sora says, his voice not his own, his voice not alone, and Xion didn’t know she could hate synchronism as a concept. Not until now. But, Hyne, she does. “Come on, it's—"  
And Sora's body ends the sentence with “—not the end of the world,” while Riku's says “—actually pretty great. All considered.” 

She stares at the two of them, so much unimpressed, so much tired of the situation and scared and lonely and irritated by Naminé's eyes on her and by her fathers' worries. 

“I do not want this,” she says, not even to them, not really. She is talking to herself and the gods and whomever will listen. She is talking to Sora and Riku, too, yes, but whatever she has to say about this might insult them. It might have insulted her brother before, she’s sure, so she doesn’t spell it out loud and hopes he – they, actually – will get it anyway. 

“We know,” Sora and Riku tell her, full of warmth. Xion is somewhat used to it, coming from Sora. Their affection for each other is rarely sweet and tender but he knows how to make it that way when Xion needs it. 

“I swear if she doesn't stop looking at me—" 

“Your magic is very loud,” her brother says, like it means shit. Like it excuses Naminé’s behavior at all. 

“This will become a bloodshed,” she finishes anyway, ignoring him and his feeble excuses. 

“Always a tragedy,” Riku scolds her, his voice so thoroughly _Sora_ that Xion doesn’t even waste a second wondering who is talking to her. And then, because this is hard to wrap her brain around, she reminds herself for the umpteenth time that no, it’s not Sora talking to her. It’s the both of them, as one entity. 

And how and why would anyone want to lose themself like that, she can’t understand, nor she wants to actually get an explanation. 

“Yes,” she says, keeping her voice low but hissing it through her teeth. “It’s always a tragedy when people piss me off.”

“Get over yourself,” Sora says, both pair of arms crossing at the same time. Just seeing it makes Xion want to retch, seriously. Her throat feels tight and breathing is fucking painful.  
“She’s probably not doing it on purpose,” he adds, from Riku's body, and probably Riku’s conscience too. What little of it remains unchanged by the mind-meld. 

Xion doesn’t know what she thought the mind-meld would be like. Her parents have been telling her and Sora all about it since it has been clear that their nature is what it is. She has thought of it with fervor, in her childhood. A Knight, all for her. Someone forever hers and hers only, to protect her and to serve her and to hold her up as she falls.  
This is the dream shattered by studies and researches. The other, the dream about souls singing in tune and holy assonance and all that bullshit— well. It's not a shattered dream, no, but it’s marred by her terror of being enclosed, her irrational fear of being held prisoner and kept in a space she can't control, she can't leave. 

Seeing it now, in front of her eyes, shows neither the shattered dream nor the ruined one. It's just a thing. For Sora and Riku, breathing easy through it and getting used to sharing a mind in two bodies, it’s just happenstance. A thing that will pass as easily and as naturally as it has come. They aren't frantic in their togetherness, they don’t pant for air or beg for space. They look at ease, comfortable. Confident of the righteousness of what they are undergoing and letting themselves be carried by its current, not struggling, not pushing it like Xion would. Like she already wants to do, even if the only thing tethered to her is Naminé's eyes and nothing else. 

She will never be as graceful as Sora is, accepting this fate. He is alright in letting destiny set his path, has always been. Xion can at least envy him that.

——

The adults don’t do much more than chattering. Talking away the hours and turning the house, already small, stuck in a corner of one of the town squares, a box of noise and discomfort. 

Xion breathes through it and looks out the window. Forbidden as she is to go outside, unless she really needs to. Her dad said that, he said: “It's better if you stay, unless you really need to get out,” with a face and a voice that felt too much like pity for Xion’s tastes. 

She can take this. It makes her twitchy in her skin and it makes her chest tight, but she can take being in this house and amongst all these people.  
Fewer than yesterday, at least. The younger woman, Kisaragi Leon had called her, has left. And so has Highwind. Tifa Lockhart stays, her voice has a pleasing lull to it and she is a treat for the eyes, if Xion has to say anything about it.  
Strife stays too, and the tension between him and dad is laughable. 

“I'm sure Ansem won't mind you staying there for some time,” Ms. Gainsborough says, soft and kind and completely wrong. No one should speak to her parents like that. They don’t deserve it, bloodstained as they are, and Xion is sure they don’t understand its value. Too old for it, too wounded by war and by military doctrine. Xion herself can barely get it and she has seen far less tragedies than them. 

“I said I'm fine,” Xion repeats, tired of her own voice, like she is tired of every other sound, like she's tired of Naminé's staring. She will have another talk with the girl. Soon enough. With more bite to it than bark, perhaps. 

“Xion, be quiet,” Leon says and Xion is already rolling her eyes at him. She wishes Sora could be here and not sleeping, right now. It’s always easier to deal with Leon when Sora’s around. His silver tongue and improv skills have saved her ass more times than she wishes to count.

“Nice to know some things never change,” she mutters, mostly to herself, honestly, but her fathers hear her and maybe Strife does too, enhanced as he is.  
Seifer sighs, resigned just like Xion is resigned. 

“We know you're strong, Xi,” he says, like he thinks this is the problem, like he thinks she has so little self-confidence as to need to hear that. “But we also realize this is not a very big house.” 

“I can take two months. You go on about your business without asking shit and I'm here with all my calculations and—"

“Xion, shut up,” Leon says, and for once Xion is thankful for it. She gets rambly when she doesn’t sleep and she always embarrasses herself.  
And anyway, after years of being told to shut her mouth it doesn’t even sting anymore, not even a little. She and dad sigh at the same time and Xion misses Sora and his word crafting and his relentlessness. He never shuts up, he’s never silenced. 

They go back at talking, Xion blocks them out like the pro she is, and she scratches her neck where Naminé's eyes have been stuck since half an hour ago.  
She can take two months of this but she will take them insane. She needs some air. 

“The shield works better in enclosed spaces,” Lockhart says, and Xion’s skin is pricked by a million needles. “The castle should be fine as long as you all stay in one place. Five to six rooms. Ten at maximum. Then it starts to lose potency.” 

Xion wants nothing more than to go back to Balamb. The training center emptying up for her and Sora and all that space just for them, all the pent up emotions free to run their courses.  
She misses it like her heart misses home. Like she can’t miss Esthar, with its metropolitan feel and its sparkling lights. Like she can’t miss Timber because all she has seen of it is in pictures of her dead mother and her once-happy father.  
And no dad anywhere to be seen. 

“And you're sure he won't pose a threat to us,” Seifer says, his hands clenched around the side of the table. He might be feeling a little like Xion does, under the watchful, never leaving glare of Strife, a current of anxiety forever bubbling up under his thoughts. She relates to him like she will never be able to relate to Leon, and this will tear their family apart, someday. Xion is sure of it. 

“He doesn’t have a perfect rep,” Ms. Gainsborough says, careful, oh so careful. Xion would be mean about it if it were anyone else. As it stands, being mean to Ms. Gainsborough is impossible. It would be like kicking a puppy. “But we’ve been keeping our eyes on him and he has been clean for some time.” 

“How long?” Leon asks. Xion is bored of their conversation but she has nothing else to do. Bar from sleep, and she won’t go to sleep until she has calmed down and she won’t calm down until she can take a breath. A proper one. It's not feasible, right now. And so she won’t go to her allotted bed and she won’t lay down with her eyes closed and her mind unstoppable. 

“Ten years, give or take,” Strife says, first thing he offers to the conversation.  
If he doesn’t stop looking at that dad like that Xion will do everyone the favor of stopping him herself.  
She really, really wishes Sora could be here right now, as a singular entity. He has never stood silenced in front of things such as this. He has never been afraid of overstepping, never been cowed into a corner, into the observer role. 

Xion might envy him that too. 

—*—

“These are my apprentices. Kairi and Ienzo,” Ansem-the dead-man-walking says, a proper introduction. Kairi is known. Familiar and lovely. Ienzo… Ienzo is on very thin ice.  
“The future queen and head scientist of the Radiant Garden.” 

The castle is imposing in front of them, standing tall and terrible, and Sora remembers through another pair of eyes, external to his own, the basement of it, the core of its darkness, its sickness.  
Riku remembers the Labs. A home far from home, a place to heal the mind. Fix the soul. Take away the fears and the doubts.  
A place to turn him and the many others like him, all unlucky souls, all deserving better, into pliable and subservient little soldiers. 

A place far kinder than the scientist lab has ever been, will ever be on his return.  
A return that will never happen because Riku is here now, Sora is here now, they are one and together and never leaving the safety of their bond. Never going back to unloving—wrong—to be destroyed places.  
Riku misses home like Sora misses wounds after a cura. A far away sting, pleasurable in its nonexistence. 

“Thank you for letting us stay,” Seifer-dad says, bowing his head like a man ashamed of himself, like a man who knows how he will be read if he doesn't. 

“Don't mention it,” Kairi says, her smile brighter than it has ever been. A victim, too, just like him. Her mind has been pacified in the past. Nothing more.  
A fighter, standing beside her butcher and looking calm like the sea on a clear day.  
A sister, in a way, who shared his same hospital clothes and his scared eyes and his fate, for a time. 

Isn't she happier now?  
Don't we want that? 

“A favor to Ms. Gainsborough is never to be denied,” Ienzo adds.  
Riku-and-Sora half remembers him, small like only children can be, with his too big lab coat on and his too big eyes, wide with curiosity, his thirst for knowledge infinite.  
Him, one wrong step away from devastation and death. 

“Now, let's not saddle our guests with politics,” Ansem says, and he too, is familiar and he, too is one step away from destruction. 

The foundations of Sora-and-Riku shake, their consciousness untangling, for the shortest moment, and they are two, opposite one another, lashing out at the wrongness of this, at the confused emotions separating them, making them less than complete, less than homogeneous. Stop, they tell each other, and stop they do. 

They breathe, as two and then as one, and he keeps breathing, eyes on the ground as to not see, as to keep the quiet, fragile calm gluing his pieces together. 

It's too soon to depart from this state. It's too soon, and both of his parts too unformed, too lacking in understanding of one another, their bond too frail. 

“You okay?” Xion asks, her hand on Sora's upper arm, a point of unwanted, unasked for focus, her voice a balm on his riled up mind. She is safety made person. She is strength and balance. 

“Yeah,” he tells her, both his voices sure enough of it, both of his voices speaking the truth.  
Xion nods her head, her eyes full of storms. 

Yeah. He's okay. Shaking and on shaking floors. Shaking in fear and confusion and rage. Thirsting for blood and revenge and for quieter times. Longing.  
The upsets of his pieces will not be smoothed out, not with so little work, and he breaths through the friction and he hopes they will be fine, in time, will be able to reconcile their differences in a peaceful, non destructing way. 

Stop, he tells himself, all of himself. Stop and calm down. It will be alright.  
In time, he will learn to take and consume and not judge, not impose.  
In time, all these little wrinkles of his parts will be gone and everything will be perfect.  
  
Mind-melding is a work of love, an understanding of every part involved. Mind-sharing isn't easy, and forcing it to be is the best way to fail at it. 

He is not going to fail. For he lacks patience, and that’s true as the sun rising in the east, but he doesn’t lack dedication. He is one, and he will be forever after. He is one, and his parts are shaking themselves over in opposite ways, offense and defense, judgment and excuses. But he is one, and all the best creatures question themselves from time to time. 

“It's not politics,” Ienzo says, slipping his way out of Ansem's touch. His one visible eye is clear and full of truths. He looks towards Riku, the part of him so vulnerable and so imposing, even with its eyes downcast. He doesn’t speak at all but Riku-and-Sora thinks he might know what Ienzo wants to say. “Just the truth.” 

Sora-and-Riku smile at him, a vicious thing. The comradeship is sweet, and sweeter still when Kairi throws a causal smile in his way, and he feels home. He feels home because he has been here to get fixed and because there are people here who hate that truth as much as he does. 

It's just the truth, they have been taught. Nothing hurts, as long as it's the truth. Nothing is wrong, if it’s the truth.  
And Ienzo has never been in the lab as a prisoner, he has never been tested upon, but he has lived through his fair share of programming and reprogramming, at least some part of him are sure of this. Or indoctrination, at least. That must be enough to free him of the death sentence hanging over his head. 

He breathes and doesn't think of the question and doesn’t try to answer it.

Patience will set this right. Patience and time. And time is in his hands, never again cut off from him, never again rejecting him. It's his, now, and it will be useful. 

——

Naminé takes them to their new, temporary, residence.  
Everyone is quiet, for their own reasons.  
His Sora shard knows some of them; his Riku shard knows others. 

Kairi doesn’t speak because Ansem is in the room.  
She has always been silent in front of the man. She has learned that the truth never hurts but silence hurts even less.  
Silence is her strength where it has never been his. 

Ienzo's place is empty, but the Riku part of him doesn’t know him enough to explain that. Shame, perhaps. Shame and desperation and the same sense of inequity that always gets to him around real people. 

Seifer-dad is humbled, incapable of accepting help without being vicious about it and incapable of being vicious with people, not anymore. He has left that behind, left it for the really important situations. 

Leon in silent because he always is, because he doesn’t speak unless he has to. He is silent because he knows his children don’t want to be here, they don’t deserve any of this. And since he has never learned how to grieve – emotionally cut off, cold like ice, do not approach, do not watch – he stays quiet and knows it will never be enough. 

And Xion, Xion-sister and powerful and Sorceress and— and. Unrestrained, unguarded. Xion is quiet because she is afraid. 

The Sora shard of him aches for her, to bring her comfort, and they move forward and grasp her hand, and she just gives that far away smile, that teasing glint in her eyes. “You're so sweet,” she tells him, venom dripping from her tongue. “Go back to minding your business now.” 

“Xi,” he says, not tender because he knows she won't accept it and not brash because he has been taught better. 

“Sora. You. Whatever you are. Seriously,” she says, poking him under the eye in his too tall body, his shape all wrong compared to hers. “I don't need your coddling.” 

“Kids,” Seifer reproaches them, so quiet as to be hard to hear. “Not now.” 

“Yeah, okay,” they say together, and Xion smiles better at him, smiles for real. 

——

The place allotted to them is nice. Not small, not so as to make Xion lose her mind, to make it uncomfortable, but not wide enough to risk the spell not working.

There are six rooms, well enough under the limit Lockhart put on them, and Naminé starts working her magic at every corner. 

“Thank you for taking us,” she says, all business-like and curt, her nose turned up at Ansem, her contempt plain obvious. Some part of him worries for her, is ready to put himself in the way. “We can manage on our own from here.” Her discomfort, too, is palpable. 

“Very well. My apprentices will be at your service, in the chance you need something,” Ansem says, but Sora-and-Riku can't pay any mind to him, scared of the earthquakes unfolding in him, scared of the wrongness and the loneliness awaiting him beyond the next shake. Every push could be enough to send him scattered. 

Kairi stays, dutiful like any soldier, at her place in the doorway while Ansem's–the dead-man-walking's steps echo down the hallway. Loud like bells thundering. Loud like a sentence. 

And after, when he’s properly gone, Kairi takes a long breath and relaxes her shoulders. She finds his eyes, one pair of them, at least. 

“It’s good to see you,” she says, walking up to him and shaking, her hands and her knees and her voice. Her eyes looking everywhere in the room. 

Sora-and-Riku nods at her, a smile ready, every part of him compliant in offering it. “Yeah. I’ve been—”  
Thinking of you, one part of him wants to say, but he doesn’t. “You too,” he settles on, all his parts, late enough to make it awkward, and together enough, two voices speaking at the same time, to make Kairi look uneasy.

Xion comes to his side, a dazzling smile on her face, her charm turned up to eleven. “Ignore the weirdness, darling,” she says, her flirting voice on. And honestly, all parts of him feel themselves crawling at that voice. It’s just not something any part of him wishes to hear. “They're undergoing a mind-meld. It's a sorceress thing.” 

“Sorcerer,” he corrects. 

“You're the outlier,” Xion says, eyebrow raised. Sora-and-Riku clicks his tongues at her. 

“Uh,” Kairi says, and she doesn’t seem perturbed by Xion’s flirting or by the weirdness, so to speak. “That's. Cool?” 

“Yes,” he answers. Xion looks like she has something to say about it but he won’t let her. 

“So, where have you been?” Kairi keeps going, looking at the Riku body and inspecting it, in a way. “We haven’t had any batches coming round for a while. I really thought I wouldn’t see you ever again.” 

“Uh-” he says. How to explain this without shattering himself to pieces? There’s no amount of dedication and love that would keep his parts together if they go down this particular slope.

“We were. We are from the Herd. Midgar. You know?” 

“Ah shit. I'm sorry,” Kairi says, patting his shoulder. 

“You're not in the program anymore,” Riku-and-Sora says, almost a question but not really. Not a question when it's so terrifying a concept in his head, not a question when it gives him so much elation, not a question when his foundations shake and rumble and threaten to break under his feet. 

“You joking?” Kairi asks, her face all scrunched up, her eyes worried. “Ansem cut that shit off years ago. He wouldn’t be here, otherwise.”

“He won't be here for long, anyway,” he says, his hands shaking so much he can’t even clench them into fists, no matter how much he wants to. 

He knows this is to be expected. The mind-meld has started unconventionally, and it's bound to be difficult and his parts are too different from each other and don't trust each other enough. Don't know one another enough.  
This is normal, in his circumstances. And still it's not something the magic keeping him whole can account for, adapt to. It's a mistake in its eyes, something to fix, something—

But he will make it work. He might not have the trust and the knowledge required for this but better than patience, and better even than dedication, he has devotion immense and a craving large enough. 

“He's-" Kairi starts, cuts herself off. She looks at the two parts of him, and at Xion. “He's better. Redeeming.” 

“Just ignore them, really,” Xion says, glaring at him like she always does when he's being weird and awkward. 

“I've got no lost love for the lab or the program, but I don't want him dead;” Kairi says, ignoring Xion and focusing on him, on his Riku's physical form, and she looks tender and nostalgic and Riku can feel it in his bones and Sora hates it beyond imagination. 

Neither do I, a part of himself says, begs to the other. Memories of the Herd springing up, either to support or to discredit, and that part of him doesn’t know what to do with it. Yes, he say, yes I have been there. Yes, it’s my whole life. 

It’s torture, the other, angrier and harsher part says. It’s torture and you’re mine. They shouldn’t have. 

Shouldn’t have dared, shouldn’t have hoped, up until now, that they could hurt him, any piece of him, and get away with it unscathed. They shouldn’t have hurt and touched and manipulated him. And now they won’t, not anymore, because Sora forbids it. 

Because Sora will put a stop to it, a definitive, irreparable stop. 

“I think it’s better if you keep this conversation for later,” Xion says, to them as much as to Kairi. Taking him — both of him — away, pulling at their wrists, her hands don’t feel like they’re touching one person, they do not feel like one, so upset and so angry-confused at each other. She hisses, her voice low and in between threat and concern: “You’re falling apart. Do you want to ruin all this progress?”

“No,” they say, he says, sure of this like of nothing else. This conviction will keep his parts glued to each other, if not mingling, if not mixing together like a perfect solution. 

“Then get yourself together,” Xion orders, placing his two bodies next to the Commander-Father-Leon. “Keep him,” she tells the man, pulling away from them and leaving them to rely on themselves. Himself. Alone in the room once again, alone in the Castle, alone in this familiar and terrifying and comforting place. 

Leon doesn’t speak to them. His silence will last a century if they let him. If he lets him.  
He breathes, again slow and focused, and tries to weave together the snapped threads. It’s a work of love, more than anything. It’s a work that should have never started so soon, but he will keep himself together, he will let this succeed. 

—

Naminé is tired and panting for breath as she finishes the shield. She looks very proud of herself, though, and she wipes the sweat from her brows with a handkerchief. “It’s done,” she announces, her voice small and rough, her chanting has been long and guttural, ancient magic, made for beings more majestic than humans, magical as they might be. 

“Thank you,” Seifer-dad says, more at ease now that Kairi is gone, too. He will be even more at ease as soon as it’s just them. Just the family, just the same people as always. 

Sora-and-Riku go on and start exploring their new, temporary residence, feeling guilty and elated and a burden all in one.  
They had to leave Balamb because of Xion. And because of Sora. And because of Seifer-dad.  
They had to leave Esthar because of Riku. Because of Sora, too, he reminds himself and his parts.  
No one’s fault if the magic choose for them to be together. No one’s fault if the past can’t be erased, if freedom can’t be acquired at a snap of fingers. 

No one’s fault if Xion can’t stay in Aerith’s house for too long.  
Not your fault, his parts tell each other, while blaming themselves and not being able to stop. 

The room he wants, all his parts want, is placed in the east, closest to the dawn, and just a touch less wide than the two other bedrooms, and it’s not a conscious decision, for Sora, but it will become one for Riku, to choose the room with less space, with less air, with less windows.  
It is a conscious decision for him, guided by familiarity, and he finds himself in love with the new place, the new colors, the new everything of the Castle. Yes, even if he has known this already, yes even if there’s a lab, in its foundations, that he wants to dismantle. 

“Are you sure you want this?” Xion asks, her eyes like a hawk’s as they follow him, the hypocrisy of it sweet enough that he won’t tease. In a way, she has always been his Knight and he has always been hers. They haven’t needed a mind-meld to finalize that and the trust and love and knowledge between them is absolute and irrefutable, eternal. “It’s far bigger than my standards.”

“We’re sure,” he says, dropping his bags on the bed and not looking at her. She’s feeling guilty, too, even if it’s not her fault, even if it’s not anyone’s fault but the scientists’, really. And Fate’s. “This is closest to the sun.”

“Yeah,” Xion says, and even if he’s not looking at her he knows she’s rolling her eyes, her drawl perfectly mocking and perfectly clear. “That’s totally the reason you’re taking it. What about Riku?”

“What about us?”

“Wouldn’t you like more space?” Xion asks, cutting, jagged like a shard of mirror. “You’re all coddling me a bit too much for my tastes, really. Quit it.”

“This is nice,” he says, “Closer to the sun than any other room. We like it. We’re choosing first, leave us alone.”

“You’re always choosing first,” Xion counters, arms crossed. She is tired. She isn’t at ease in Radiant Garden like she has been in Esthar. She feels oppressed in the small town, in the small streets, in the castle, even. She feels her Fate closing in on her tail, breathing down her neck. Sora-and-Riku knows this like he knows what magic sounds like. A knowledge never learned but never absent, either. It’s just how they are. 

“I’m not doing you a favor, Xi, really. What do I care about you?”

She fakes a laugh and he gives her a real one in turn, one of his bodies laying down, testing the mattress, finding it exactly as it expected, too soft and too… tailored to pampered people. Not a place for soldiers, this Castle, these bedrooms. Not a place for people used to sleeping in pods, either.  
Not a place for any of them, but they will all take it. Kindness, even if weird as the one being offered, is never to turn down. Kindness is what makes the world go round. 

“It’s absurd to let me have the biggest room when I’m alone,” she says, coming over and sitting on the bed, too. “Huh,” she goes on, testing the firmness with her fist, her knuckles sinking down and messing with the covers. “This is shit. Whatever, keep this room, I’m sleeping on the couch.”

“Then I’ll keep it,” Sora-and-Riku says.

“No, fuck you, I want this room. Seriously.”

“You seem confused,” he tells her, not stopping to think about it.  
No, he says to himself. No, this is normal. This is how we work. 

Xion furrows her brow at him, at the shape of him still standing, working on putting away the clothes all wrinkled up in his bags. “No, you seem confused.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Riku is not used to this. We. We’re not—”

“Twist yourself up some more,” Xion interrupts him, her grin wide like a shark’s but her eyes still concerned, still full of unspeakable worries. She wouldn’t say those aloud, it’s not in their nature. 

“Whatever, fuck off,” he says, because it’s easier and it’s normal. She knows and he knows she knows that it’s not an easy situation, and she doesn’t make it a fault. A defect. Something to fix. “But we’re keeping this room.”

“Why?”

He sighs at her and both of his bodies click their tongues. “Because it’s closer to the sun. We’re not doing it for you, Xion. Really.”

“You sound like dad,” she says, half mocking and half irritated. Riku-and-Sora rolls his eyes at her. 

“We’re—” saying the truth, he wants to say, but he doesn’t want to either, but he has nothing else to say about it except for that. “Whatever. Go away,” he settles for, since it’s familiar and practiced and something Xion will understand. 

“Hey, banter aside…” she starts, all her posturing leaving the premises, her face getting serious. She is rarely serious, and even more rarely she is serious in front of someone that isn’t Sora. He loves her for this confidence she’s giving him-as-two-people, for the unquestioned acceptance. He can’t tell her, not ever, but she already knows, and the love he has for her is endless and the love she has for him is the same. “You don’t look too, uh, melded. What’s up with that?”

He shrugs his shoulders, his hands playing with the air. “We started too soon. We don’t know each other as we should.”

“So… Why are you doing this?” she asks, munching on the inside of her cheek like she’s wont to do. “I don’t get it.”

“I know,” he says, smiling up at her. “We just want to. We want to… We need this.”

“Okay, but why?” she insists, starting to gesticulate herself. Upset, maybe, or maybe just pissed because she can’t understand him, for once. For maybe the first time ever, or the second.  
Years ago it had been “Why are you a boy?” and only now could Sora-and-Riku offer a coherent explanation for that, only now he understands her, and he’s sure she might understand him about this, about the melding, someday. Once, if, she goes through it herself. 

“I don’t know,” he says, shrugging again. “It’s— a call. It’s like being right. Being… in the right place. We’re having some problems but it’s nothing that can’t be fixed.”  
Xion just sighs, all her questions and doubts swimming in her eyes, but she doesn’t ask any of them, she doesn’t voice anything else. She knows he won’t be able to explain it better than this and he knows she wouldn’t understand anyway. 

—*—

Naminé accepts the many thanks the Lion of Balamb and his pet ex-villain give her — too many and too awkward and half unwanted, really — and she makes her way, slow as the sleeping, outside the Castle.  
It’s not a great place, not for her magic and not for her mood, the knowledge of what has happened between its walls is still fresh in the collective mind of the Radiant Garden, and in hers more than anything. 

She appreciates the Sorcerer, here and now, for his desire to destroy everything, to annihilate Ansem and his minions, even if she can’t back him up. She has taken her vows and she won’t end a life, not ever. She is not that kind of person. She can hate in silence, though. She can hate and she can hope for revenge, for— unethical justice, if it’s even a concept that exists. 

The Castle doesn’t feel alright to her, and now more than ever, with the sweet call of magic pulling her back in its twisting hallways, in its maze of a building. She tries as hard as she can to ignore it, but her eyes are pulled and her whole being is refusing to listen to her. 

The Sorceress, Xion, stands tall and proud on the tallest roof, of her only her wings are visible, from down where Naminé’s stands, but even those are enough, even those are too much. The magic calls, begs for her attention, for her closeness, and Naminé has never learned to ignore her magic, has never been taught how to silence it, how to make it leave her alone. 

No. The teachings she’s got about magic have all been issued by Aerith, and Aerith believes in perfect communion, in listening, in openness and trouble-solving.

This trouble in particular, though, Naminé can’t see how she could ever solve it. The Sorceress, Xion, she tells herself — not special, just more magically inclined, not special and not deserving of a title, not when she has done nothing to earn it, not when she’s so young and ineffectual, just Xion, just a girl like any other, just a girl Naminé feels called to, feels devoted to — doesn’t want her.  
Xion doesn’t want her close and she doesn’t want her staring and she doesn’t want her to be her magic’s Knight. 

She can’t solve this, it’s out of her hands. But her eyes stay fixed, without her consent, and her magic whines and longs for something it will never have, probably, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself, with all these feelings threatening to bring her to tears. 

Naminé would have never chosen Xion as her Sorceress.  
Well, she would have never chosen to be a Knight in the first place, honestly, but in the eventuality, she wouldn’t have chosen Xion.  
She’s aggressive, as she has proved a couple of times already, she’s impulsive and distant and cold, just like the Lion of Balamb, just like all the people Naminé can’t stand. 

The Sorceress — Xion, the Goddess damn it, just Xion — is powerful, too. Far too powerful for Naminé’s little reserve of magic potential. Far too powerful for anyone in Radiant Garden. There is no one singing like her, no one even coming close to it, if not for the Sorcerer himself. If they were to Knight for each other… But well, it would be a wish for disaster, for one thing, and unethical for another. If they haven’t chosen each other by now—

Naminé doesn’t know much about Sorcery and Knighthood. She knows what Aerith has told her, what little has been printed on her course-books back in school, what little has been said on the radio or the news. Many agree, Sorceresses are dangerous creatures. Prone to incurable madness, prone to cruelty. 

She thinks cruelty suits Xion, her face cut for mean and hurtful, but her eyes are far too careful to let anyone believe she could be mad with magic, her control over her power too firm to fool anyone into being scared of her. Not afraid of her losing her mind, at least. Maybe just the opposite. Maybe they should be afraid, afraid of Xion’s mind so calm and calculating, her plans perfect to the last detail.  
Maybe they should be afraid of how smart and patient she is. 

Maybe Naminé’s being silly and idolizing her, her magic feeling so raw and needy. Clinging to a call that wasn’t even issued, that isn’t even wanted.  
She should stop here and save herself some embarrassment. 

“You know,” Xion says, and now she stands in front of her, unruffled, not a single steel feather of her wings disturbed, not a single hair on her head moved. Space magic?  
How quaint, Naminé thinks. The Commander got himself a matching set. Time and Space in one go. He must be proud of himself beyond imagining.  
“I usually don’t mind girls ogling me like you are,” she says, giving Naminé a look that could only be described as lewd. “But I will make you the exception.”

“I thought it was clear enough that I’m not doing it on purpose,” Naminé tells her. She is tired, her magic is tired, and the last thing she’s going to do is to keep herself on constant vigilance in case her eyes might wander. She doesn’t have the mind to pay attention to such inane details, really. And she would think the Sorceress herself has far more pressing problems to mind than her bouts of staring. 

“I don’t think you’re putting in the effort to stop, though,” Xion says, managing, somehow, to sound both haughty and flirty at the same time. It’s a gift, Naminé supposes.  
A gift of very little use, though, and she’s not impressed by it just like she's not impressed by Xion’s magic, just like she’s not impressed by anything that’s going on. “Effort is 80% of your final score.” 

“I'm not in your class, Xion. Nor am I trying to piss you off on purpose. And I didn't choose this for myself or for you, either,” Naminé says, tired beyond belief.  
She hasn’t got much magic to start with, and lately Aerith is making her push herself over and above her limitations, constantly. So it’s her that has to put up the shields, it’s her that has to go through their morning routine with the flowers, it’s her that has to go out and work magic for the people of Radiant Garden. All little quests, Aerith says, to help take her magic one level up. Or two. Or ten! Aerith sometimes says, her smile wide and bright and pure. You’re still young Nami, if you train now you could become more powerful even than me, she says. 

Naminé both believes it and doesn't. Her magic is more useful now, more easy to guide and direct, and the well has deepened since she has started studying under Aerith, but it’s been a year since she has improved any and no patience will make her believe this isn't the finish line for her. 

Maybe if she bonded with Xion things would change, but that’s not even in the lists of reasons why she would like this to just get on and get done. She wants her peace. She needs her peace. And her magic being like this, upset and irritable, is the furthest thing from peace she has felt in a while. 

“I didn’t choose this either,” Xion says, her voice cruel and her teeth showing, like a dog warning it will bite if not left alone. Naminé has no doubt Xion will bite her, either metaphorically or literally, if she doesn’t start paying more attention to her wandering eyes. 

And Naminé gets it, really, but still she thinks this is stepping over a line, just a bit too much. She isn’t doing anything but looking. 

“And that promise of beating you up is still valid. So. I would stop if I were you.” 

“No. If you were me you would feel how much you’re singing for closeness and how needy you are,” Naminé hisses back, her tiredness and the empty-spent feeling of her magic making her brusque like she has promised herself she would never be again.  
She has taken vows of kindness and purification. Vows to make the world better one day at a time, one word after another. One spell after the other. Efforts and efforts and efforts. Trials and too many errors. But she has promised herself and her Goddess.  
And these words she’s speaking now, this fight she’s giving into? It’s not and will never be assonant to her vows. She needs to cut it out. 

“I know what I am,” Xion says, all pricked in her pride. A wound too easy to inflict, the target so wild and glaring bright. “And I know it’s not anyones fault but the magic’s. I’m not asking you to stop being called.” 

Naminé knows Xion hasn’t asked but she also thinks she would have, if only it weren’t impossible to change the magic’s mind.  
She thinks Xion would have gladly taken her off her role, given her up for someone else, emptied the slot allotted to her Knight and kept it like that forever.  
Naminé doesn’t have an inkling of an idea why that might be, but she knows it as true. There is the phantom feeling of suffocation at the base of her throat, not painful or unpleasant, just there and closing in as Xion reciprocates her staring and moves closer. 

“Look,” the Sorceress says, maybe accepting that Naminé isn’t going to reply or maybe just needing to add this. “I’m sure you’re not a bad person and all, but I don’t want a Knight and I definitely don’t need one, either. And you, looking at me all the time? It makes me uneasy,” she says, and this makes her uneasy too, Naminé sees it in all parts of her, in her clenched fists and her clenched teeth, in her fluttering eyes like the wings of a fly, in her discomposed breaths.  
“I'm claustrophobic, like,” Xion makes a gesture, her arms extending, “big time,” she says. “You're smothering me and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. Please stop or I will stop you.” 

“Are the threats really necessary?” Naminé asks. She feels… not really guilty, not yet, but it’s close. She doesn’t know what it’s like but she understands discomfort and phobias and she doesn’t want to be the cause of either, or the agent setting them off. But still, Xion’s attitude might be acceptable amongst soldiers and soldiers in training but it isn’t for her. It isn’t acceptable here, in Radiant Garden, country of alchemists and gardeners, of soft spoken people with softer hearts and all-over frailty. 

“Yes, apparently,” Xion says, like stung by a swarm of bees all out to kill her. “Yes, because you don’t seem to get it otherwise. Seriously! I get it. It sucks. You think I'm not getting signaled by your magic like fuck? Because I am! And still I manage not to look at you twenty-four seven just to let you know.” 

“My magic is nothing, compared to yours,” Naminé says, and Xion recoils, just a tiny little bit, her back snapping up straight and perfect, like called at attention. She is a soldier through and through, Naminé supposes. “Obviously it doesn’t have the same pull on you that yours has on me.” 

“Well,” Xion says, sounding like she might be conceding victory. Naminé would be glad if she were but she knows it’s too easy. Far, far too easy. This isn’t victory, this is stalling for time, begging for a second more to think of a rebuttal.  
Naminé knows fights. She has two brothers and she knows how fighting works. “Sure okay, whatever,” she says, sounding just like the Commander. Naminé wonders if she knows of these similarities, if she can even stand them at all or if she rather pretends they don’t exist in the first place. 

It must be hard, being the daughter of a soldier. And it must be even harder being the daughter of Leonhart. Him so cold and distant that Naminé has difficulties believing him for a real human, sometimes.  
She sees him on the news, on odd days, and Aerith gushes about him like she gushes about all her old famous friends, and Naminé has to wonder how his children ended up like this. “Obviously it's not the same thing. But I'm sure you can stop anyway.” 

“This isn’t about me looking at you, is it?” Naminé asks, guided by doubts. Something in the way Xion behaves speaks highly of posturing. Of forever being the girl amongst soldiers, always being the wrong one amongst everyone. The scandal of her coming out has been talked about for months on end, even if it was almost assured it would come. And the scandal of her brother insisting on being a man is still going strong, to booth. “This is about you telling me to stop. And since I haven’t, you need to impose your dominance and make me comply. Isn’t it?” 

Xion looks at her now, her forehead wrinkling and her brows furrowing. “You do drugs? I swear you don’t look the type. Not judging,” she says, showing Naminé her palms. “Hyne knows I use from time to time myself. But no, to answer your question. Or yes, I guess. It is about you staring and it has nothing to do with my need to show dominance. This isn’t a stupid power play, darling. This is me telling you to quit before I punch your teeth in.” 

“Call me darling again. Let’s see whose teeth starts falling first,” Naminé snarls, the pet name so wrong in her ears, not just dripping poison but wholly wrong. It tastes like mocking and if there’s something Naminé hates it’s being mocked. 

Xion gives a bout of laughter, her whole face lighting up like firework, and Naminé sees how gorgeous she is, under her scowls and her posturing and her big bad soldier-Sorceress persona. Her magic yearns for a touch, it craves to hold that laughter close and make it last forever. Naminé herself, in the meantime, hates the world and her fate and the magic all for having chosen her to act as Knight for this stupid, stupid creature that can’t be bothered with manners or kindness. 

“Oh, you're great,” Xion says, breathy with giggles and snorting. “You're great. But I doubt you can do much damage with your dainty hands.” 

“Nothing dainty about a Blizzaga,” Naminé says, and hers…. Well. She is posturing herself. She realizes this as she gets tenser and tenser, preparing for a fight that she couldn’t even take part it, she shouldn’t. Not by her vows and not by her heart.  
She is putting up a front because she is tired and cranky and she wants to find something that will rile her mind up enough to make up for how empty her mana feels. She understands this. It’s what she always does. But where usually stands Aerith now there’s Xion, the Sorceress her magical core is so enamored with, and where she usually would be given a warm cup of tea and the advice to sleep it off, she’s being offered blow for blow, acerbic remark for acerbic remark. Meanness for meanness. And yes, she is right. Mean looks good on Xion, and it feels good on herself too. It fits like a glove, like a tailored dress. 

“Not to burst your bubble, but your magic will refuse to hurt me. Not to say I wouldn't be able to par it.” 

“It's still mine,” Naminé says. She would like to add that it’s Xion that won’t take it for herself, even if she’s offering it, but she doesn’t. Even in her tiredness Naminé has the mind not to make this far too painfully awkward. Far too shameful for her to bear. It’s already enough of a dumpster fire as it is, as conversations go. Not too different from fighting with Roxas, really. 

“Yeah, sure. But it won't hurt me anyway. You’re welcome to try,” Xion says, one perfect eyebrow raised. 

“No,” Naminé tells her. “I’ve wasted enough of it as it is.” 

“There’s a reason why Knights usually kill their sorceresses with weapons, instead of magic, you know? This is it,” Xion says, not careful but not blasé either. Naminé wonders if the Commander killed his late wife or if he let someone else do it. She wonders if Xion and Sora know, if anyone knows at all. “The magic just doesn't understand why people don’t go along or might want to hurt each other. Especially when they are bound to each other like— like my brother is to his Knight. So you wouldn’t be able to hit me up with your Blizzaga, but I would love to see you try it.” And that's it. Xion is back to being lewd and making discomforting faces. Naminé heaves a sigh and rolls her eyes one last time before gluing her sight to the street.  
She gets back to walking home, like she should have done from the start, before giving Xion a reason to start this conversation. 

“Sorry,” Xion says, appearing right next to her a couple blocks down the road. “I’m just a flirt. Sorry.” 

“I'm leaving you alone, as per requested. Can't you do the same?” Naminé asks, almost a snarl but not yet there. She keeps her eyes low, fixed on the ground, and she doesn’t move, doesn’t let Xion see how she has been startled. It would be— it would feel like conceding victory. She's not even sure there is a competition going on in the first place. 

She’s just tired and cranky and she doesn’t have the best first impression of Xion. Which, Naminé specifies to herself, is in no way her fault. She will never like every human being she comes in contact with. No matter how much she wants to. Sometimes humans are just shitty. 

“I just asked for you to stop staring at me. I don’t mind making new friends. We’re going to be here for a while and you seem nice,” Xion says, her hands, Naminé can see, are holding each other still, gripped together so tight the knuckles are whitening. “Listen,” she makes a pause here, like she’s waiting for something. Naminé looks up at her. “I know I can be a huge bitch, sometimes. I know. I'm sorry. Can't we forget about all this and start from zero?” 

Naminé mulls it over, looking into Xion's eyes. They are blue, but not like any other blue eyes she has ever seen. They are blue and deep and full of magic.  
Starting over is… a great idea, actually.  
She offers her hand and Xion grabs it, a smile on her face like the sun shining bright. “I'm Naminé Farron. Nice to meet you.”


	4. Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did it! I hate this chapter. I reread it too many times. But it's done!!!

One week after the Ragnarok takes them to Radiant Garden, Sora opens his eyes to find himself alone in his mind. Not alone in his bed, tragically, but that’s a problem for never, because Riku is still asleep and he can kind of slither out before anyone has to live through a very embarrassing situation. 

There are so many things he needs and wants to do right now, so many things to explore, both in his headspace and in real life, both pleasing and terrible.

One week of mind-meld has not been that much, but seeing Radiant Garden through his own eyes is different, feeling the breeze on his own skin is different. Even the air doesn’t smell the same to him. The bed and its warmth he has just left is not the same either. 

Being together and being apart is such a jarringly different experience. He can’t come to terms with it just now, so he doesn’t try to.   
He wanders his new temporary house and finds the kitchen, pours himself some coffee and ignores how his stomach is rumbling. There will be time for breakfast, later, when his fathers come back from their morning training — or whatever passes as it — and Xion and his Knight wake up, when the castle won’t look so terrifyingly wide and unknown, when he will be more stable on his feet and less reeling from everything that has just stopped happening. 

He isn’t alone, not properly. He can hear the current of Riku's thinkstream, his emotions and his magic like a soft buzz in his brain, like unassuming company. But he is, too. Alone, that is. He is alone and he’s not. He sleeps and he’s awake and, more than anything, his magic is calm, helpful, friendly to him for the first time since it has been bequeathed onto him, a burden placed square on his spine. It finally answer to him, placid and content in its rightful place, lining his lungs and his arteries, buzzing in his veins, in his throat. It’s everywhere at once, filling him up and expanding with him as he breathes. Decompressing as he exhales and enjoys the silent, sleepy morning.   
His magic doesn’t roar anymore, it doesn’t scream at him. It softly pines fro Riku, left alone in the bedroom, alone in his sleep that Sora still shares, at least a little. Alone and sad for it like Sora is alone and sad for it, like the magic is alone — but never alone again — and sad for it. 

Sora sips his coffee and tenses at every chirp of a bird, at every whisper of breeze. That haze of half-sleep sitting heavy on him. Riku is waking, and he can feel every second of it, the sun shining in his eyes from the fissures in the shutters, the cold spot he has left in the bed, and the loneliness.   
He has one terrifying second to put up his walls, before Riku awakens and finds him in his head, melded properly and comfortable in there like he will never be anywhere else. 

It’s not as much instinct as it is anxiety moving him through it. Frantic panic gurgling in his insides, taking up the space meant for his organs, stealing his breath and his rationality away.   
He thinks back to himself, looking at all that makes him what he is, from an outsider’s point of view.   
Mom, and the consequent trauma. Balamb. The missions he and Xion completed. All those details he loves to pretend don’t exists, all those faces he has scrubbed from his memory, or has tried his best to. All his problems, all his instability, his masks, his manipulation, his fucking flaws and disturbing thoughts.   
Death owning him, blood staining him forever.

He thinks of Riku. Innocent, despite everything. Not a drop of blood on his hands, not an evil shard in him anywhere. Untouched by the worst side of this world, the side Sora has been born and raised into, the side Leon and dad, too, have been born and raised into, all of them shaped by it. 

Sora mourns their lost togetherness but the walls go up nonetheless. He won’t impose on Riku’s already fragile psyche, not like this, not so soon, not without having talked about it first. He won’t subject him to all this, not now that they’re not properly together, not now that he can’t guide Riku away from it, take the burnt of these truths. 

And on top of everything, he has memories, all tangled up, of childhood. Of a terrifying lack of privacy, of too many things that hurt and that Sora doesn’t want to face, just yet.   
It would be pointless, anyway. He would rather do this disentangling with Riku there to tell him which memories are his and which are definitely Sora’s. 

But still, even if he knows this is the best solution, being cooped up behind walls and borders and stop signs is a bit like being choked to death. Maybe oppressed by a great weight, maybe silenced for real. He knows Riku is just there, one step and one little magical effort away, and he wants to get back to him, craves it like nothing else, but he can’t. For just this once, he needs to be strong with and for himself. 

He hears Riku coming, his steps quiet but not quiet enough for the sense of a soldier, and surely not quiet enough for Sora, raised by two paranoids sure that the world is out to get their children.  
He hears Riku, and he sees him in the kitchen doorway and he can’t describe it in any other way than jarring. Painful, maybe. It hurts, seeing him there and not feeling him, not understanding him as easy as he would have if he didn’t put up the walls. But what else is he supposed to do?   
Riku has enough problems, in his life. He doesn’t need Sora in his head, poking around and being a nuisance. He doesn’t need the intimate knowledge of all the wrongs he did, either.

“Good morning,” Riku says. He’s weird and blessed, he doesn’t suffer from sleepiness clinging to him as he wakes, but he is confused, Sora sees it all over him. Confused and maybe uncomfortable. 

“Coffee?” Sora offers, his voice awful and rough like it always is. 

“No, thank you,” Riku says, shaking his head a little, his hair still braided in a tight plait, draped against his shoulder. Sora remembers the weight of it, the pull as he turns in the night, and it’s awful and rough. Like his voice, like the walls his mind is crashing against. Like every part of him begging him to put them down, to let him and Riku be together again.   
He doesn’t concede. “You—” a pause, long enough that Sora can lose himself staring at his Knight. “How are you?” Riku eventually says, face twisted in an expression Sora doesn’t understand. And it hurts, the inability to feel what his Knight is feeling, but it’s fine like this. He will accept this, get used to it, sooner or later. 

The mind-meld is over and now he has to learn how to be a singular entity again. He has never had problems with it, and letting one week of his life ruin seventeen years of work is completely stupid. 

How is he, he asks himself. He’s good enough, all considered. He says: “Great. Just— a bit confused, still. But I’m great.” And he knows his smile is fake, he knows he’s wearing the same mask as usual, and he also knows Riku knows about all this. He must. Despite all the effort Sora put in deviating his attention away he must know at least some of this. 

Riku doesn’t push it, though, despite the look in his eyes changing to something colder, something distant. “You?” Sora asks, because he craves to know and because it’s the polite thing to do. 

His Knight stalls, for a moment. He’s still, standing and uncomfortable, he doesn’t know what to do with himself, Sora’s magic warns, pleas. Like Sora could do anything about it at all. He has already offered coffee, he can’t keep listing beverages until Riku will take one. Also, he has hands and legs that function, he tells his magic, he can get himself his own damn breakfast.   
And maybe this line of thought shows on Sora’s face, or maybe Riku just chose to stop being like that, and he gets moving, working at his own tea-making. Right, Sora tells himself, feeling like an idiot. Which he is. Right, Riku doesn’t even drink coffee, he doesn’t know why he offered. Habit, probably. “I’m good,” Riku says, getting water and lighting the stove. Sora follows the sounds and refuses to turn around and look at him. “It’s been… I.” A sigh, long and tried, escapes him. Sora still doesn’t turn. 

“I see you’re still losers. I’m glad,” Xion interrupts, stumbling in the kitchen like a wrecking ball, the soft ease that was just about to be born in between them shattered to a thousand pieces.   
Sora glares at her like he has never before. And Xion, being Xion and being the bitch she is, smiles at him. “You’ve got no idea how happy I am to see you.”

“I’ve been here all this time,” Sora tells her, sipping at his coffee and mourning the lost solitude. Well. The lost time he could have had with Riku, just the two of them. Not really solitude when his Knight is an entirely separate being from himself, is it? Not really solitude when Sora cut him off first thing after the mind-meld, his magic snaps at him, or maybe it’s his subconscious, or maybe all the parts of him that want to cling to Riku and never let him go, not ever. 

“So,” Xion says, ignoring him as per tradition. “How’s it going? What’s the verdict. Mind-meld yay, mind-meld nay?”

Riku heaves another sigh and Sora isn’t quick enough to stop himself. He turns and finds him hunched over the stove, his shoulders curved like weighted down. He wants to take all that weight away, place it on himself or shoot it in another dimension, either option is fine, as long as it stops bringing Riku down.

“I’ll take that as a square nay, then,” Xion says, waltzing around the furniture and getting herself her own cup, her own coffee, her own seat at the table. She pokes Sora in the cheek as she passes him, and he hates her for her blasé attitude and for her questions and for interrupting his morning with Riku, but he returns her gentle smile. 

“It wasn’t bad,” Riku says, his voice so feeble and weary. Sora’s eyes start burning and he focuses on his cup. That’s it, there’s his cup and not much else in the kitchen. He’s drinking coffee, slowly getting accustomed to the waking world again. Nothing else going on. His magic, all the while, trashes against its boundaries, it cries for him to stop keeping it prisoner. He doesn’t listen. 

Coffee, coffee, coffee, his mind singsongs. Everything is fine and he’s drinking coffee and nothing is happening. 

“Sure,” Xion says, nodding to herself, pretending to be wise and weathered. “You look just peachy, both of you.”

“Shut up, it’s morning,” Sora snarls at her. Xion gives him a Look. “No. Don’t even.”

“I wasn’t evening,” Xion says, shrugging her shoulders. “But really, how are you?”

“Fine,” says Riku, coming to sit with them at the table, eyes in his cup and playing at being non-bothered. 

“Great,” says Sora, but he can’t fool Xion. He will never fool Xion. She knows him too well and she knows his tricks, all of them. “Did you sleep?” he asks her, because she’s never this chatty after waking up, never this into interpersonal relations. 

“Yeah. Couple hours.”

“Yeah, sure. Go to bed, Xion,” he says, pushing her cup almost off the table. She catches it before the coffee spills everywhere and she glares at him. 

“Very mature of you,” she drawls, draining the rest of the cup and slamming it on the table. “I’m going out, have fun being awkward.” 

“Fuck you,” Sora says, waving her bye. He waits until he hears the door closing and he finds in himself the courage to look up at Riku.   
Riku doesn’t look back but his shoulders are tense and he looks awkward and out of place and like the last thing he wants in his life is to be here, in the kitchen. With Sora.

Sora makes himself believe it doesn’t hurt. Not even a little. It doesn’t sting and it doesn’t burn, this realization, going down his throat. It doesn’t hit like a stone on his stomach.   
Some discomfort is normal, he supposes. They have spent — the most of — seven days being one person and now they’re two, trying to reconcile with that is bound to be… less than amazing, really. He himself doesn’t feel so great about it.   
“You were saying?” he prompts when it dawns on him that Riku will not speak unless spoken to. 

His Knight looks up, eyes wide like he didn’t expect it, like caught in the middle of something terribly wrong, even if he was just staring in his cup and looking miserable. “I. It wasn’t important. I don’t know,” he says, voice breathy, still. 

“It’s weird, right?” Sora says. Maybe it will be easier for Riku if he starts opening up about his true feelings. And he can now, he’s safe here, with only his Knight and no one else in the apartment. He’s safe and comfortable and his magic whines and trashes and his mind reels against its boundaries. But he’s at ease, even in his onlyness. “Being alone. It doesn’t feel right.”

“Yeah,” Riku says, taking a tentative sip. He makes a face and leaves the cup alone.   
Sora is hit by the memory of a taste he has never sampled on his own tongue, but that he knows, intrinsic like he knows what the air of Balamb feels like on his skin, like he knows the sound of Xion’s voice.   
Memories of the food in the Lab, the cooks never showing their face but Riku and his kin know they’re there, somewhere beyond the great white doors, living the real life, being real people with a real job and no purpose written down for them like a substitute of Fate. “Why—” Riku starts, a question in and of itself, but it’s not done, it’s not what he wants to ask. They both know, already, why this feels so wrong,. They know and they don’t have to say it aloud. 

But the real question, the one Sora fears to hear and wouldn’t know how to properly answer, why he has cut Riku off, why he’s imposing this loneliness on the both of them, why is he doing this… Well. That isn’t going to be asked. Riku doesn’t finish his question and he doesn’t finish his tea, too bothered by the wrongness of both of those things, and Sora lets him. 

—

Sora looks up as the door to their weird apartment thing and he knows he’s brooding and he knows his dad knows. He does that little _oh no_ face he always does when there’s some drama to take care of, and Sora really doesn’t want to bother him right now. Or be bothered.   
He’s fine. He’s great. He’s just feeling like a wet rag because he forced himself to stay here while Riku went back in— well. Not their bedroom anymore, for sure. Sora can't share a bed with him. It's so embarrassing he can’t even think about it, really. Not as a real thing that could happen. 

He’s just going to share Xion’s room. She won’t mind. She will mock him for it but she won’t mind. 

“So,” dad starts, standing in the doorway, soaked in sweat after his morning regiment and looking like he would rather be anywhere else in the world. “It's over, huh?” 

“Dad,” Sora whines. His voice is still rough, unbelievable. He hasn’t spoken much, that’s true, but his mouth feels like a desert no matter how much water he drinks and his throat is raw and parched. Either he’s getting sick or the magic is having some weird collateral effect on him. Or maybe he should just stop sighing.   
It’s just— Riku left him alone. Out here. And he doesn’t know what to do with himself now. He can’t check on him and risk it being seen as a— a control thing. And he can’t leave the apartment and he can’t go in Xion’s bedroom uninvited, she’s like a vampire in reverse and no one can enter her spaces without permission and hope to stay alive. 

He doesn’t know what to do. And he’s bored and restless and he wants to do so many things, but all those things include Riku and he can’t go and ask him to participate in Sora's life anymore than he’s already forced to. He definitely can’t ask him now that he has cut him off. 

“Kid,” dad says, shrugging his shoulders. “I don't think I can help with this. Maybe when your father comes home—”

“Yeah. No. No thanks. If I see Leon,” and Sora doesn’t finish the sentence because he has too many things to say and he doesn’t really feel any of them. Leon has been seriously, one hundred percent not sarcastically great lately, but he’s still shit at emotions and Sora is still shit at managing his mood. No. If he sees Leon now it will end in a fight and Sora doesn’t want to fight. He wants to go and be with Riku. He wants to do something. Anything to keep his mind and magic busy. Anything at all, really. “How was training?” he asks, because he sees the expression on Seifer’s face and he doesn’t want to have that conversation again. He knows how it goes.   
_You should stop calling him that_ and _you know he has his limitations but he loves you and your sister very much_ and _he’s doing his best, his circumstances_ — well. Sora knows Leon's circumstances. And he knows Leon loves him and Xion a ton and some but still. He has one dad and he doesn’t need another. He wants to keep Leon without making him into some sort of parental figure. Which he isn't. Not even if he contributed genetic material to Sora's and Xion's conception. 

“Good. Better than Esthar,” Seifer says, conceding victory and not starting one of his rants. It’s not Sora's fault if his dad is the founder of Leon's fan club. He shouldn’t have to pay for it with his time and his patience. “Why aren’t you with your Knight?” 

“I don't know,” Sora says, and he means it even if it’s not really true. There are a thousand reasons why he’s not currently hogging all of Riku’s attention, and no reason at all in particular.   
He could go and ask Riku if he wants to hang out. There is nothing stopping him. But getting up from the couch is so much effort and Riku left the kitchen looking all bothered and consumed by thoughts and Sora doesn’t want to disturb.   
He’s too awkward to go and talk to him, especially now that he has enforced this separation in their mind.  
“He just left,” he says, and even if it’s the truth it doesn’t feel right at all, not like this, out of the context Sora is purposefully not explaining. Dad doesn’t even want to know, for sure. 

“It’s not good for you to stay separate, Sora,” dad says, in that soft reproaching tone he puts on whenever he wants him and Xion to really listen. “Go and be with him.” 

“But. Ugh,” Sora whines again, sinking some more into the too soft couch. “He just left!” he says, again, raising his hands at the ceiling like that will change anything. “Because I might have done something. It’s not my fault,” he says, looking straight into Seifer’s eyes before his dad can even think of starting with the questions. “I just—" he waves his hand in front of his head, like a barrier. “—you know?” 

“Totally,” his dad says, and he gives Sora a look. “What did you do?” 

“I’m. I don’t know. I just went on radio silence. Put him on mute. I don’t know what to tell you. It’s for the better!” Sora says, not liking the expression on his dad's face one bit. 

“Leonharts,” Seifer says. Just that. He just says _Leonharts_ , all pissed and huffy, and he leaves Sora to his brooding. 

“I’m nothing like Leon,” Sora shouts after him, but he knows he’s far too much like Leon for anyone’s liking. He’s awkward and stilted and impulsive. He’s cold, too, when he wants to be. Not an inkling of affinity for Shiva, but Hyne is he cold when he wants to be.   
And he has no idea how to talk to people. 

Seifer comes back after a while, showered and changed into different training clothes. “Go talk to him. For real,” he orders. Sora hasn’t moved an inch, or maybe he has, but if so he has only sunk deeper, both in his head and in the couch. 

“I don’t know what to say,” he tells his dad, no masks and no frills. “I’m too awkward to talk to him.” 

“So?” 

“So. I can’t just go and talk to him. Obviously.”   
Seifer looks at him, in silence, and Sora feels duly ashamed of himself. “Whatever,” he says, rolling or climbing off the couch or maybe getting free of its claws. “Whatever. Hyne. Everyone is so bossy in this family.” 

Seifer mutters something under his breath and Sora doesn’t even want to know what it is. Really. He has enough of his dad for right now. Yes, even if his dad is being exceptionally reasonable and chill about all of this.   
Yes even if his dad is right. Completely right about all of it.   
Sora doesn’t care about being right. He just. Doesn’t want to go and have this conversation. He doesn’t have any idea how to even breach the subject. Any subject. He doesn’t even know how to break the ice and he’s freaking the fuck out. 

The door is half-closed. Great, he tells himself. Maybe Riku has heard everything and this will only be just about three thousands percent more awkward than expected.   
Just great. 

He knocks, his mouth betraying him and going “Knock, knock” because he’s an idiot and a loser. He does it every single time he has to knock on a door. It's ingrained in him like any one of Leon's emergency plans.   
Riku doesn't stir. He stays hunched on the desktop, his hair still plaited, still in his pajamas, the room untouched since Sora left for coffee almost three hours ago. 

He knocks louder. Riku twitches and turns, eyes narrowed like he expects to find a threat. He relaxes, a little bit, when he sees Sora there. “Hi,” he says, putting on the fakest smile Sora has ever seen in his life. He takes his earbuds off and leaves them on the desk, amongst his books and papers. It's stuff he has brought with him in Esthar. Sora almost remembers what's in it. If he just focuses a couple of minutes he would remember it. But he doesn’t care enough to, and Riku is looking at him, expecting. Waiting. 

Sora looks around the room, stalling for time and searching for something to say that won’t make him look like an absolute idiot. The idiot he is, actually. 

“Do you need something?” Riku asks, bringing his hands together and resting them on his lap. He looks like the perfect painting of poise and Sora envies him like he envies Xion. All these graceful people make him mad. 

“No. Yes. No,” Sora says, his tongue getting in the way of his teeth, somehow, and the sting of it helps him regain the last shards of social skills he has buried somewhere in his brain, between one useless piece of information and the next. “Not really. I just. I would like to stay with. Can I stay with you?” he asks, and he pats himself on the shoulder – not literally – for a job done. Not well, not even passable. But it's done. 

Riku’s eyes flee to each corner of the room a couple times before he shrugs. “It's… not my house. You can do what you want?” he says, completely and wholly unsure of himself. Sora doesn’t need a mind communion to know that, plain as it is on his Knight's face. 

“It’s not mine either.” He feels an eye roll coming and he wishes Xion could be here, interrupting them and saving them both some painful interactions, being mean about their awkwardness and overall lighting the mood. “I just feel like shit being away from you.” 

Riku gives him a look that Sora understands perfectly well but that he will not acknowledge. No matter the levels of torture involved.   
“Me too,” he says, eventually, look gone and past. He’s a blessing for letting Sora get away with it and Sora’s appreciation for him turns up a notch. No one in his family has ever given him the same kindness. “I guess I can’t go home, yet, huh?” 

It sounds like a joke, like something that is meant to be a joke in all its parts, but Sora’s stomach drops like he has been hit by a punch. His mouth dries up again, dry as the desert. Dry as paper. “You're not going back,” he says, hating how the words come out, all wrong and harsh and ungraceful. “You're not going back,” Sora tries again, with more conviction, holding Riku’s gaze with his own. Locked, then, in an impasse.   
An impasse that Sora doesn’t fear at all. He’s not going to compromise on this. He’s not going to cede on this. Not ever. 

“You’re not my master, Sora. I don't have to obey you,” Riku says, calm enough, maybe too calm. 

“You don’t have to obey anyone,” Sora snaps. But still, he would like for Riku to listen to him, this once. Maybe not obey, per se, but listen to him for sure. 

Riku crosses his arms, waiting for Sora to go on. He doesn’t have any follow up ready, though, and they stay in silence for a while, Sora's breathing calming down until he feels collected and reasonable and mature enough to have a conversation that doesn't end in tears. 

“Riku,” he says, his insides shaking. “I. I don't want you to go. They'll try to rip us apart. You said it yourself.” 

“And you said they can't, so the problem doesn't subsist.” Riku looks at him, kind but angry too, and Sora stands in the doorway even if the only thing he wants to do is hold his Knight tight and never let him go. “Sora. The Herd is my home. My family. I know you know how it is.” 

“It's not the same thing,” Sora mumbles, and he doesn’t know how to explain this out-loud and he can't put the barriers down and hit Riku with a thousand, a billion emotions all at once.   
He chose to have this conversation as two separate people and he will pay the price in full.   
“Leon is a good man. I don't like him much but he has never messed with our heads or our— Our everything.”

“You hate him,” Riku says, not cruel but stinging and meant to. 

“And you don't hate the Herd just because you’ve been taught not to.” Sora has always hated being so much a prey to his own emotions but this time in particular he can't stand it. This time in particular he’s trying to reign them all in, keep control of himself. 

“It's my family,” Riku repeats, not even bothered. Sora knows why he isn’t bothered, he knows and he hates it. Riku has been made like this. This isn’t him. This is a carbon copy of every other clone out there, all taught to be calm and collected, all punished if they cant managed to be. And Riku has been punished more than most. Reprogrammed and fixed and called defective too many times to count, always scolded for making problems out of everything. 

“I know,” Sora says, because he does know. He understands Riku like he can't understand even himself, by now. He knows all that Riku feels, he has dug as deep as he could in his memories of the Herd, of the labs, of the scientists. Both to understand and to get information, both to damn the whole program and to find even one little thing to pardon in it.   
And he hasn’t found any. The program is evil like only humans can be, and it will be destroyed, and Riku will go on with his life like a real human being. He will learn how to exist in function of himself and only himself.   
“It doesn’t excuse what they've done to you. And it doesn’t mean I have to accept it. I. Please,” Sora tells him, looking in Riku's eyes and begging every god in the heavens, begging them to make his Knight listen. Understand. 

“Your acceptance doesn’t mean anything,” Riku whispers, turning away from Sora's stare. “It's my life. My home.” 

“I know,” Sora repeats, keeping the sting in his eyes at bay. He can— He should be able to have this conversation without crying. He can cry later. He will definitely cry later. “They hurt you. They're hunting you like an animal. They will keep hurting you, Riku. You don't deserve that.” 

“You've seen what—" 

“Yes!” Sora shouts at him. “Yes, I've seen everything they did to you and it's not right! You just can’t see it because you’ve been indoctrinated since birth!” 

“I wasn't born, Sora,” Riku says, still not looking in Sora’s direction, still too quiet and closed off. This isn’t getting any better, Sora thinks. This can only get worse and worse if he doesn’t stop it right now. 

But. “You know what I mean,” he says, because he doesn’t want to stop it, just yet. He will not stop it until Riku understands why Sora doesn’t want him anywhere close to his so called home. “Let's not play the semantics game.” 

“No. They made me. And they want me to be in a certain way. It's not— It's not wrong. I was made for a purpose and I'm not useful if I can't manage to—” his voice cracks and Sora knows it's not because he's terrified by what he’s saying, like he should be. No. Riku’s voice cracks because he feels wrong. He feels defective and a failure and an embarrassment for the monsters that made him. “It's not unreasonable! If your appliances stop working you buy a replacement. I'm the same. And they’ve given me so many chances, I. I can't do this to them.” Sora wants to scream until his throat bleeds. Until his lungs implode. Everything about this, everything he has seen and remembered from the Herd makes his stomach churn. His hopes for humanity flee one by one, as quick as hummingbirds. 

“You're not. Riku. You're a person. You're a human being. You're not a fucking oven.” 

“I'm not like you,” Riku says, and Sora hates that he knows what his Knight means. Yes, Riku is not like him. Yes, the whole thought process behind that makes it seem so reasonable. Riku wasn't born, he was made. He needs to be useful or he won’t be needed. They can make so many like him, but never like him, because he’s the mistake, the burnt cookie, the defective one. And he’s being kept and given chances out of the General’s kindness and he doesn’t feel like he deserves it. 

He is replaceable, unlike other humans. He’s not special and he better be useful or he’s going to stop existing. 

“You're important to me,” Sora says. One last appeal before he finally accepts this as a lost battle. One last appeal before he shuts up and goes back to feeling alone and upset and miserable. “And to my magic. You know how much we— we care for you. It's. I don't want to lose you.” 

Riku sighs and shakes his head, braid hitting the side of his neck. His eyes finally meeting Sora’s again, and they’re so tired. So weary. 

“I don't want to make this choice,” he says, sounding so small and so fragile that Sora might really break into tears. “I’m. I care for you. And I didn’t have a say in the matter, but it’s still— I still do. But I care for them too. For my life. I don't want to choose between you or them.” 

—*—

Sora leaves the room with teary eyes and a nod and Riku is alone for hours after. He can't find it in himself to move from his position or to move on with his thoughts. 

Everything is raw and twisted and too complicated for his tastes. He's ready for a fixing. Has been ready for some time now. He can't tell Sora, and he can't show him anymore, how free being reprogrammed makes him feel. How unbothered. How relieved in every way.   
When he’s fixed he stops having problems. It’s meant to keep him compliant.   
No.   
It’s meant to keep him at ease. Because he was made to be a diplomat and a substitute for the General and he needs to be calm and collected and he can't bring months of burdens and preoccupations on his shoulders.   
Fixing is a form of help. Relegated to the Herd and the labs and his life, and he knows that Sora can’t really understand, so different his upbringing and his whole existence, but the reprogramming is meant to soothe and take away the pain and the worries and the shame of his mistakes. 

And Sora can say all he wants – even if Riku would rather prefer he didn’t say anything at all, not about this – but he’s the one who pushed Riku out, who made it clear in anyway that Riku, despite being wanted by the magic, is not welcome anywhere too close.   
He has made peace with this. Riku knows himself. His flaws, his weak points. He knows he's not nice to be around and he doesn’t make it a fault to Sora. Not really. But he can't appreciate the lies his Sorcerer spills like water from an overflowing cup. He can’t appreciate the pleas for him to stay when Sora has pushed him away and locked him out without even one word about it. And he can't appreciate how Sora just wants everything with no effort whatsoever. 

But it's fine. He expected this conversation to pop up. Gods he expects it to pop up times and times again, the one thing they will never agree on, no matter what the future reserves for them.   
And it’s fine. It's fine. He doesn’t need to listen to the impulses his mind is giving him, he doesn’t need to agree with Sora on every little thing. He doesn’t even need to like his Sorcerer, really. 

Now that the hardest part is done and gone – and now that Sora has made it plenty clear he doesn’t actually want Riku as close to him as he says – Riku could just up and leave, without saying anything. 

The magic would deal. He's okay with being separated from Sora, really. It's a bit painful and a bit uncomfortable but it’s nothing he hasn’t felt before, nothing he can't learn to ignore, in time. If the reprogramming waiting for him doesn’t cancel it out in the first place.   
He has intimate knowledge of the bond now, and the magic, and all his and Sora's communion should be about, is about. The royal promise between a Sorcerer and his Knight. And he knows, even if he would rather not, even if he would rather it being untrue, that the bond between them has settled and will never leave, will never be broken. Not by the Program, at least, and not by distance and not by time. 

Riku accepts this. He is glad, too, to have initiated and completed the bond before he knew anything about it, before he could be stuck in Xion's same position, before either he or Sora could object to it. He is glad and he feels right in his position, maybe because the magic wants him to or maybe because he really, actually is.   
But nothing will change his wish to go back to the Herd, nothing will make him less homesick and less out of place.   
Nothing will make him accept Sora's mindless desire to destroy his whole life, his whole family. 

—

Xion doesn’t knock but Riku doesn’t need her to. His door – the door to the bedroom he has shared with Sora until now – is sill open and he's still in the same position he has held all afternoon, his muscles tired and tense, his mind going a mile a minute. He has so many things to review, and he needs to see them all, know which ones will definitely be canceled by the next reprogramming and which ones he might be able to keep. Everything about Sora will go, and he will stay uncomfortable and uneasy for who even knows how long and he will have no way to understand why he feels like that, but he’s fine with it, seriously. 

“You're invited to the kitchen,” Xion says. She doesn’t seem any less at ease talking to him now that he’s not melded to her brother, but she does look like she would rather be anywhere else but here. “The fathers want to talk to you.” 

“Thank you,” he says, seemingly popping every one of his articulations as he gets on his feet. Xion gives him a very pointed look and Riku realizes he knows how to read her face, still. She feels familiar and beloved in his heart even if he has maybe talked to her all of one and a half times.   
“Don't say anything,” he pleads with her, rotating his neck until his vertebra go back in their rightful positions, until his muscles all burn too much for him to stand. It's his fault for keeping so still. 

Xion rolls her eyes at him, somewhat affectionate, and she gestures for him to come closer. “Come on. No one deserves to listen to them while already in pain, seriously.” Riku does get closer, the trust he has for her not innate from his body but still true and tested, thanks to the mind-meld, and still whole. There is no part of him wary of her, and he lets her turn him around and he lets her get her hands on his back, on his very tense neck, on his shoulders. 

Xion hums as her magic – a simple curative, Riku's mind supplies – seeps through his skin. She pats him and says: “There you go,” all proud of herself at seeing the release of tension in him. And Riku doesn’t feel for one second the need to pretend, in front of her. It doesn’t even come to mind that he should put on a façade, not until after she has already healed him. “Now go. Hop-hop. They get pissy if you make them wait.” 

I know, Riku wants to tell her, but Xion has kept most of her reservations about the mind-meld for herself and Riku thinks that he’s doing her a favor doing the same. Keeping the topic off limits, not telling her how much… how much he knows about everything going on in this family, about the fine details he has branded all over his brain like perfect instructions.   
So he doesn’t say but he does get in the kitchen on quick feet. 

He’s not very into the idea of having a conversation with the Commander in the first place, his feelings for the man jumbled and so very confused to start with and only made worse by Sora’s emotions. Riku refuses to be the reason why the Commander and husband are pissed off. 

Xion comes with. In a way he expects it, her steps so quiet behind his, her presence almost imperceptible. But he knows the sound of her magic and it buzzes, all fretful and uneasy, and not even that could be hidden, not even Xion could silence that. “Sora is being a complete nuisance. About the Herd and stuff. Just so you know,” she says. Riku keeps a sigh trapped behind his teeth and nods. “Not to say I don’t agree with him,” Xion goes on, her voice fitting perfectly in the stillness of the early evening, her grace so plain and so grand. Riku is forced to focus on it even if he can't follow the threads that move his consciousness, even if he can’t pinpoint why he cares so much about it. 

There are no raised voices coming from the kitchen, just the murmurs of people talking amongst themselves, and Riku stops, not even thinking about it, and he lets Xion precede him.   
He weights his possibilities. 

“Here we are!” Xion announces, far too loud, stepping through the doorway. “As per requested, I've brought the Knight.” She bows like a page, showing off, maybe to take Riku's mind off things, or maybe to forbid him any possible escape. 

“Xi,” Sora says, all puffed up, looking like a ruffled bird.   
Riku would know what he’s feeling if his Sorcerer hadn’t put up walls in between them. 

“Get in here,” Leonhart says, brash and curt and just like Riku knows his children can't stand. He knows far too much about Leonhart and his husband. Much more than what the folders about them have to say, far more than Riku would like to, in all honesty. “Both of you,” he presses when he sees that Riku is stuck where he stands. 

It’s not that he fears the conversation about to happen, not really. All his old problems about talking near people and being amongst humans have been– taken away. Fixed. Dispelled. 

Riku is not afraid as he steps in the kitchen and leads everyone's eyes to one of the empty seats. They're all staring at him and he is not afraid of this. He is wary, sure, because wariness will save his life, sooner or later, but the panic he knows he would have felt just a year ago is not there, his heart beats normally and his lungs work properly and it's one of the weirdest feelings. 

“What’s this about?” Xion asks, and she can stay away from the table, she is blessedly exonerated from the cape of tension and discomfort draped all over them.   
She is so very lucky. 

Leon, the Commander, takes one small breath, maybe hoping he won’t be noticed, maybe thinking they’re all unaware of his tension. Riku thinks his hopes are far too high. 

“The overall situation,” Seifer supplies, taking pity on his husband. “The next steps.” 

Sora groans and drops his head on the table and Riku would like to do the same, even if it wouldn’t be dignified at all. 

“Wow. Exciting,” Xion drawls, quiet as the breeze coming in from the open windows. 

“We can't trust Ansem,” Leon starts, his shoulders dropping from their hunched position and his face squaring up in that peculiar way that means he’s ready to put on the Commander persona again. “You— We would like you to stay away from him,” he says, mostly to his children, but he gives Riku a look, too. 

“For now, sure,” says Xion, and “No,” says Sora and Leon just sighs with resignation in his eyes and Riku relates to him a lot, right now. He feels a spiritual connection. 

“And we're not safe outside these few rooms, so leave only if you must,” Seifer says, laughing at them all. Riku knows he’s laughing at them. He just can’t remember why or how he knows or what is telling him. It’s just a feeling, as true as the sun in the sky. “The priority now is to keep Riku safe.” 

“I'm safe,” Riku says, keeping his tone neutral but friendly, like he has been taught all his life.   
This is much easier than talking to Sora. Sora is emotional and wants things from him. Sora knows too much. Sora has seen too many buried things, things Riku himself barely knows.   
“They wouldn’t hurt me. The priority should be keeping yourselves safe.” 

“They would hurt you,” Sora snaps, getting back up in a normal sitting position, so quick that Riku fears for the state of his neck. 

“Kids, no,” Seifer says, his voice not leaving room for any arguing. Sora pouts and Riku looks away from him, every molecule of his body wishes it could leave this room and this conversation behind. But he sits, still and demure like he's supposed to, and he stays quiet and doesn't tap his fingers or his feet and doesn’t do anything of those things that have been— taught out of him. He's better than that. He can and will stand one little conversation without breaking down in undignified stress indicators. He can do it. 

“You're not safe, Riku,” Leon says, and his voice too doesn’t leave room for debate. “We can't know if they will want you dead or if they would just take you back to the Herd. So please, don't do anything reckless.” 

But Riku knows. He knows they would take him back and reprogram him. They would never hurt him, not really, not irreparably. He was chosen by the General. They can't get rid of him without consequences. And if there's one thing he knows the scientists don’t like, it’s consequences.   
He doesn’t say this. He has been told to be quiet and quiet he will be. For now. 

“And no more talks of murder,” Seifer says, this time it really is directed only at his children. He gives them a look that Riku is so very glad not to be the target of. “Or about destroying the Herd.” 

Xion and Sora puff up like puffer fish and Riku could almost laugh at them. They look so very prickled by this. 

“We're taking care of it,” Leon says before either of the twins can start their tirade, and Riku is glad only for one second, only until the Commander's words register in his mind. 

“No,” he says, together with Xion and Sora, but with a very different meaning. “No, please,” he goes on, and being at the center of attention is like a bear trap closing on his heart, but he can do this. “It's my home.” Riku looks in the Commander's eyes and he doesn't know if he should feel all this discomfort but he still does, no matter his teachings and his fixings. He will always be defective, anyway. 

“Homes can be shitty like any other place,” Xion says, crossing her arms and looking down at Riku with— something. Some kind of emotion coming from her that Riku knows he can interpret but doesn’t want to. He rather not acknowledge it at all.  
“And yours, in particular—" 

“Xion,” Leon scolds her, and Riku wants to be like him so much. The man could silence even the Gods with nothing more than a word and a well placed gesture of his hand. “I don’t want to hear one more word about the Herd.”

“Whatever,” Xion says, her back colliding against the wall and her head turning away, she looks out the window, her cheeks still puffed up. 

Riku knows that with Xion silenced for good, Sora won't be much of a problem.   
He knows this not as a comfort but as an irritation. Something uncomfortable under his skin, at the base of his throat. The feeling of being useless alone. It echoes in his mind but it’s not inborn, it doesn’t come from himself. 

The conversation, after that, goes much more smoothly. The Commander lists off recommendations and orders – thinly veiled as advices – and some of those apply to Riku too, he is made known through looks, so he pays attention and doesn’t let his mind wander away like he could, theoretically, in unimportant meetings. 

When Seifer finally tells them they’re free to go, hiding his exasperation under a blank look that his children – and Riku by osmosis – have learned to read a thousand years ago, really, everyone breathes many sighs of relief. 

The worst of it, Riku tells himself, is over and gone. 

“Commander, sir,” he says, his voice not as smooth and easy as he would like it, too rough after spending the best part of the day in silence, too open, showing the stupid and pointless agitation awakening in his chest. 

“Leon,” the man corrects him, and Riku nods at that, unsure if he can comply but not going to make a big deal out of it. It’s in no way relevant to what Riku has to say. 

“I.” Riku has a thousand things he wants to say and a million ways to start this, so many premises he would like to list off before he makes his request, but his throat is closed off and his voice seems to be out of commission for the moment.   
Defect after defect all piled up, that’s what he is. And he will push through this too, like he pushes through everything. “I know your children's comfort comes before mine,” he says, and the Commander's eyes narrow. “But I ask that you do not hurt my family. Please.” 

Leave alone that it would be a terrible diplomatic faux-pas. Let alone that it would probably mean war. Let alone everything bureaucratic that Riku should but doesn’t care about. That’s his home. The Herd is all his life. Those people are his family. He doesn’t want to see them hurt or dead or destroyed. He has no idea how to explain this to the Leonharts in a way they will understand. 

“Hyne,” Seifer says, behind Riku, and he hears the man get up from the table and walk out of the kitchen, thankfully. The Commander is probably the least unreasonable out of all the people in this family, seriously. If he even has a chance to be listened to, Leon is the one he needs to talk to. And less people are present, the more at ease he will feel, anyway. 

The Commander just stares at him for some time, and Riku just waits. It's not like he can do much else. 

“I'm not equipped to have this talk,” the Commander says, eventually. He breaks his composure and runs his fingers over his scar. “Put the coffee on,” he orders, and Riku frets to obey, unable not to, not when he is ordered in that voice, and the Commander sits back at the table and looks at the veins of the wood, not saying anything. 

Riku gives him a cup, thankful now for the knowledge Sora has left behind in his head, so very grateful of not having to ask how much sugar or milk to put in the coffee. He places it in front of the man and. He doesn’t know what to do, seriously. He is very uncomfortable, he tells himself, maybe he should leave. 

“Sit, Riku,” the Commander tells him, soft and kind like Riku – or Sora – has never heard him. He sits down, damning himself for even starting this conversation, for even daring to think this would be easy.   
“Your comfort is important. Just as much as the twins'.” One gulp of scalding hot coffee. Or maybe not. There is a thin layer of ice crystals hugging the cup. Almost like lace. Riku envies the delicateness of that magic. He’s amazed, too. The control needed for such a thing is… over the ceiling, really. “Whatever you're part of. It's not humane. It's a violation of many codes. Many human rights. I wouldn't be able to count them off for you.”

“They're not—" Riku tries, and the Commander gives him that twitch of his hand that clearly means he should stop talking. Riku would know to stop talking even if he didn’t have all this borrowed knowledge in his brain. It’s plain obvious. 

“I couldn’t ignore it even if I wanted to. I would be complicit in their crimes and I would deserve to be put in jail, just like they are,” the Commander says. Riku would love to be able to explain this in simple terms. 

The Herd isn’t cruel, he would say. The Herd is no violation of human rights. They aren’t humans, they're experiments, at best, and things and clones made with a specific purpose. They aren’t. They—   
The Gods help him, he can’t even argument this in his own head. 

“I can promise you we will not kill any one of them. I will talk to Sora and Xion and tell them to stop with their threats, but that’s all they are. Threats. Nothing for you to worry about. Your family will not be hurt.” 

“They don’t deserve jail either. They're not doing anything wrong,” Riku says, his voice too breathy and upset. The Commander gives him a look that can only be described as pitying. 

“You can't be the judge of that,” the Commander says, his hand finding Riku’s on the table and Riku is both terrified of the touch and amazed at how cold Leon’s fingertips are. His skin is dry and burning. Just like ice. “I know forgiveness,” he tells Riku, looking straight in his eyes. Riku is stuck. He can’t even breathe. “I know you want to protect them. But right now you can't. You need to acknowledge the wrongs they did to you first, and to heal.” 

“I'm not— I. They made me,” Riku says. He wasn’t born. He’s not a proper human. He was made. And he thinks this is the point where the Leonharts keep stumbling off tracks. They want to see him as a person when he so obviously isn't. 

“I know,” the Commander says. “It doesn't change things.” 

—*—

Xion leaves the castle.   
Now, dad said “Leave only if you must" and she thinks this qualifies so she doesn’t feel either guilty or worried about it as she drops the ten feet from her window and lands like a prima ballerina on the soft grass that surrounds the building. 

She told Sora she was going out, anyway, so he can tell the parents if they freak out about her absence.   
Sora is not being much fun today, anyway, so she doesn’t even have to tell herself she could stand being home with him. He’s pining and he has only himself to blame and she could, theoretically, stay to pick on him but she feels very magnanimous today. It’s a good day. 

She got her brother back and one new shining person to bother and make friends with and a whole new town to explore. Xion absolutely loves exploring new places. It makes her feel like— Like she can breathe properly. It makes her curious, properly, of everything around her. It makes her want to laugh and run and move, and just be. It makes her feel like she’s a kid again, back before Balamb and before everything that went wrong in her life. 

Radiant Garden is not wide, not by any meaning of the word. It’s an little town in the middle of nowhere and the people behave accordingly. Everyone stares as Xion gets to know the streets and the squares and the buildings and the shops. 

Radiant Garden is small and cozy and characteristic, someone kinder than her might say. And Hyne, is it magical. Just walking around doing nothing, Xion feels almost overwhelmed by the songs. It's all so very loud, louder than Esthar, and surely louder than Balamb. It's just different, really, because those were proper cities with proper city noises, and this is a little village with nothing but screaming magic, cooped up in every stone, every wall, every little detail of it, etched in the town's essence. 

Radiant Garden is really great, no irony or sarcasm in it. She absolutely loves it.   
And she would love it better and more if Naminé wasn't there. 

“Hey,” she says to the girl, stooping in her steps. It’s her fault for not remembering where Ms. Gainsborough’s house is, she tells herself. This once she can’t blame her supposed Knight for staring or for being interested in her. Xion is the most interesting thing around, after all. 

“Good evening,” Naminé greets back, her hair pulled out of her face by a stark white ribbon, her hands and the knees of her long skirt stained in dirt and grass.   
She looks absolutely delectable. Xion feels the thrill of a crush dawning on her, setting low in her stomach in a swarm of butterflies.   
Naminé is maddening, yes, but she is also fine boned and pale and gorgeous. 

“What you doing?” Xion asks, not getting any closer. Naminé looks tired, in a healthy way. Tired like she spent the whole day in the training center. Or, well, maybe working. With her soft hands and her slim figure, Xion doubts the girl trains much in the arts of battle. 

“Gardening,” Naminé says, her hands moving to indicate the garden and its upset dirt and Naminé’s own conditions and all the gardening tools laying neatly in a wicker basket just there by her side. 

Okay yeah, Xion admits to herself and herself only. It was a stupid question. But it’s not like she has much to say to this girl other than the routine “What you up to" and “Would you like to bang" and Xion is not yet ready to ask Naminé to get down and dirty. Not really.   
Sex begs intimacy and she doesn’t really care to have any intimacy with Naminé. Not when it could set off the sleeping bond between their magics. 

If it weren’t for that, though… 

“What are you doing? Shouldn’t you stay under the protection spell?” Naminé asks, and Xion realizes she has spent far too long just staring. Hyne she is tired. She hasn’t been sleeping properly since the night before they arrived here and she is starting to feel the consequences of that. A bad idea. 

“I needed air,” Xion says, shrugging. She is careful about it, even if she doesn’t have either the breath nor the time to waste explaining it. She is careful to disguise herself under layers of space and illusion magic. She is careful to have a redirection spell ready to activate as soon as any foreign magic touches her topmost layer. She is very careful about everything. People just think she is a reckless idiot because she wants them to. It’s all part of the plan. “Family time got so tense,” she says, fluttering her eyelids. Naminé looks weary of their conversation, already.   
Such little patience. 

“Why are you here? I haven't bothered you today,” Naminé says, collecting her basket and smoothing down her skirt. There is a smudge of dirt on her left cheekbone and Xion would love to clean it off for her, but she holds her horses. 

She says: “You've got a…” and she indicates her own face. Naminé rolls her eyes at her. 

“Yes, thank you, I’ve spent three hours working the garden, forgive me my uncleanliness, my liege,” she drawls, and goes as far as to offer a curtsy. 

Xion feels the laughter start down in her diaphragm and she doesn’t hold it in, doesn’t even try to. “I'm just saying,” she tells Naminé. And yeah, the girl is maddening. Completely. But she is also exactly Xion's type.   
It isn’t a mistake the magic chose her to be Xion’s Knight, no. But it is a great pain in the ass. “Show me around?” she asks, giving her most disarming smile. Her feelings are one hundred percent confused about everything and she doesn’t care one bit.   
She wants to know this town and she wants to stay close to Naminé and she wants… so many things, all of them opposite to each other and all of them so very needed. 

“Show yourself around,” Naminé spits at her, mouth pursed in a pout. Xion might just plant one on her. Kiss it off her face. 

“Come on, I promise not to threaten you again,” Xion says, hand over her heart. She knows Naminé wants to spend time with her because Xion feels the same, because it’s the magic telling them they should stay close to each other and get to know each other and become friends, become one. Complete at last. 

This last part she is choosing, wisely, to ignore. She will give the magic the closeness it wants, for her own damn reason, thank you very much, but nothing about the bond or the communion or, Hyne forbids, about the damn mind-meld business. 

Naminé rolls her eyes and sighs, rubbing her face, where Xion informed her she is smeared with soil. “Fine. You’re buying me an ice cream, then.”  
Xion offers her arm and counts this as a victory. 

—

The ice cream parlor — gelateria, they call it in Radiant Garden, pretentious fuckers as they are — is a nice little shop half a mile from Ms. Gainsborough’s house, and this time of the evening, despite winter dragging itself through its last few weeks of life, it’s full of people. Xion refuses to move one single step in it. “Not a chance,” she tells Naminé, who is giving her a look that may mean many uncourteous things, but Xion is ignoring all of them. “We can just sit outside and wait for them to get our orders.”

“How very spoiled you are,” Naminé drawls, holding her skirt off the ground and braving the crowd. Xion pouts in the relative privacy of a street full of people. People who are staring at her, to booth. She is the novelty, the Sorceress. This kind of staring, that comes with burning curiosity and nothing else, she is used to. She relishes in it, too. It’s kinda nice being at the core of everyone’s thoughts. She gives every passers-by a smile. 

Naminé comes back after ten full minutes, and she holds two cups in her hands and she looks half mad and half victorious. “There you go. You can pay next time.”

“I will,” Xion says, accepting her cup and sitting at one of the little wrought iron tables. “Thanks.”

“Shut up,” Naminé says, starting in on her _gelato_ with the ferocity of a starving woman. Xion has never tended after a garden, but she supposes it’s hard work, if Naminé’s whole state is any indicator. 

The gelato is actually pretty… uhm. Creamy and smooth, heavy, too. And too sweet. Definitely not the kind of food she’s used to. Sweets aren’t really high on the list of foods found in the Leonhart-Almasy household.   
But this is nice, Xion thinks, accepting the weirdness of the gelato as a bribe for Naminé’s presence. She doesn’t dislike it, not really. It’s just completely wrong. 

“So, why are you here?” Naminé asks as soon as her cup is empty. She has gelato all over her face and Xion, her lesson learned and all, doesn’t tell her. 

“You brought me.”

“No. Why are you bothering me? You haven’t answered yet.” 

“It wasn’t intentional,” Xion tells her, shrugging. Her cup is still almost full and she pushes it in Naminé’s direction. “You wanna finish it?”

“You don’t like it,” Naminé says, brows furrowed. She accepts the cup, though, and she takes smaller mouthfuls now, her hunger placated. 

“No it’s fine. I just—” Naminé glares at her, scary as only Leon can be. “I don’t like it, no,” Xion says, showing the palms of her hands. 

“It wasn’t intentional is not a reason,” Naminé says. She is pretty focused on this thing. Xion huffs and shrugs, again. 

“I was just walking around, really. Showing myself around. And I found you,” she says. Someone bumps against their table, making Naminé’s second cup fall to the ground. Xion doesn’t let it collide, nor the cup nor the ice cream in it, and she might be showing off a little, but it’s only because her magic is very pleased and wants to look at its best for its Fated Knight. Naminé’s eyes are wide and pleased, though, so Xion doesn’t complain too much about it. 

“Thanks,” the girl tells her, and she hurries to finish her treat. “You can take me home now, if you have nothing better to do. I can show you around more tomorrow.”

“Aren’t I supposed to stay under the protection spell?” Xion asks, mostly to be an asshole. She doesn’t mind having a date with Naminé. Not at all. 

Naminé doesn’t bother replying to that, just gives Xion a look that says more than enough. Xion smiles at her and offers her arm again, well learned in the arts of chivalry. Naminé accepts, her hand cold on Xion’s elbow, chilled by the ice cream and probably by the chilly breeze that has raised with the sun’s fall. Xion wishes she had the mind to bring a sweater. She could be all cliche about it and it would be cute as fuck. But sadly, she has only her shirt and she doubts the people of Radiant Garden want to see her topless. Not so soon after they’ve arrived, at least. 

“I have the afternoon free, if you want to hang out,” Naminé says as they reach Ms. Gainsborough’s house. “And— Well. I can extend the protection to your current location, as long as we’re together. So you don’t have to worry about that.”

“You’re adorable,” Xion says, not quick enough to stop herself. “But I don’t need it. Seriously.”

“Are you really so arrogant as to put your whole family in danger just to prove a point?” Naminé asks, slow and visibly angry. She gets tenser and colder against Xion’s side, her eyes like an ice desert. Some kind of desolate ice age scenery. 

“No,” Xion says. “No, I have my own spells up.” It’s not a card she would have liked to show so soon but, whatever. She would really like if Naminé didn’t hate her to the marrow. She will sacrifice some of her secrets for it, if there’s no other way. 

“Oh,” Naminé says, her cheeks turning red and her eyes looking away. Just that, Oh, and nothing else. Xion laughs at her and takes her to the doorstep. 

“See you tomorrow, then,” she says, and Naminé nods, still red in the face and too embarrassed to look at her. “Goodnight.”

“Night.”

—

She gets home early enough for dinner. Which means early enough to sit through her parents’ tirade about not going out alone and stop being reckless and blah, blah, blah. So many blahs are said.   
It all starts with “where have you been?” not even angry, just exasperated, a bit like Xion is feeling, really, because she has heard this so many times in her life.   
And then it goes on with “Only if it’s strictly necessary, Xion” and _yeah_ , she says, _I know. It was_. And on it goes and on and on.   
And Sora, maybe forgetting he has been pining and sighing all day — and that Xion has so much ammo against him to last her for a lifetime of mockery — laughs under his breath and pretends to eat his dinner. 

And then, not really usual but terrible nonetheless, Leon receives a text message. He looks up at her and his eyes are undecipherable. “Aerith is gushing about you going on a date with her apprentice,” he says, and Xion feels all her exasperation evaporate. She misses it. Exasperation means she is all right with what’s going on. The look in Leon’s eyes says this will not be alright at all.

“Hyne,” Sora says, giving her one of his very impressed looks. “High five,” he says, and Xion is torn between high five-ing him and rolling her eyes and explaining that no, no it’s not like that. For once in her life it’s totally not like that.

“That’s a low five,” Riku mumbles, not raising his eyes from his plate. He looks— He looks worse than he did when Xion left, that’s for sure. 

“Does it make any difference?” Sora asks, like a bite, like the start of a fight, and Xion feels like she has lost a lot, just being out a couple hours. 

“Do we need to have the talk again?” dad asks, maybe to Xion or maybe to Leon, but the two of them are stuck in a stare off and neither can momentarily answer. She tries to explain to Leon, just with her eyes, that this time is not like that and that she is a responsible almost-adult and she definitely doesn’t need to sit through the talk again.   
And that really, really, really. It’s not like that. 

She says so, too. She says: “She was just showing me around. Not a date. It’s not like that,” but she knows Leon can see through her lies and she knows he knows she would like it to be like that. It’s a mess. It’s a mess and it’s all Leon’s fault for being the closest thing to a telepath that exists in the world. “And even if it was—” she tries, but the looks both her dads are giving her are enough to shut her up. “It happened once!” she says, because she can’t be quiet about it, seriously. 

“Do we really need to go through that again?” dad asks, almost pleads. 

“Do we?” Leon asks Xion, and Xion sets her mouth in a determined line and tries to come off as the reasonable, mature person she isn’t. 

“No,” she says. 

“Praise be Ifrit,” dad says, being the melodramatic idiot he is.   
  
“Wow,” says Sora, and he and Xion roll their eyes at their parents and Riku looks in his plate like it holds the secrets of the whole universe. She will go and bother him later, see if he needs anything. She will go and be a good almost-sister. It’s something to do, almost an adventure, really, if nothing else. 

“It’s more traumatic for us than it is for you,” dad says, receiving a glare from Leon.   
Leon seems to be in one of his moods. Xion shares a look with Sora and he tells her everything she needs to know.   
Leon is in one of his moods, he doesn’t want to talk about it, and they should all expect an explosion coming the next few days. 

How marvelous. 

The rest of dinner goes in silence. Xion eats because everyone will question her if she doesn’t, and the food sits heavy on her stomach, heavier, maybe, than the two spoonfuls of ice cream she at earlier. It might be time to sleep again. Not that her magic seems inclined to let her. It’s so… uncomfortable. It feels uneasy, stuck in her body as it has literally always been. It’s just the knowledge that Naminé is out there, so close and too far away. It’s just her magic throwing a tantrum. She won’t give into it anymore than she already has. It would be counterproductive. 

Xion invites everyone to leave her alone as she loads the dishwasher. She is glad for its presence but she has to wonder what kind of guest room/guest apartment should ever require a dishwasher. Aren’t there servants for these things? Isn’t this a castle?   
Radiant Garden is full of weird people and weirder costumes.  
But it’s fine. Having something to do gives her time to think. Or time to let her mind just peacefully wander away while her breaths get slower and more rhythmical and she finds her inner quiet, so very needed if she wants to have an inkling of sleep tonight. And it’s not like she has anything else to do. She wants to wait until Riku is calmer, too, before bothering him with her questions and her caretaking, and she wants Sora to be painfully afraid of what she might do to retaliate his laughing at dinner before she goes to him. 

She has maybe half an hour to waste, still. 

—

Waking up in the kitchen is not what Xion would call habitual. But it has happened a couple of times before.   
She rises from her seat, damning her whining back and herself, for she has no one else to blame for this and for the pounding headache in her temples. 

I’ll just rest my eyes one minute, she told herself, and here she is, wanting to lament everything from the dryness of her mouth to the beeping of the dishwasher. “Fuck off,” she tells the machine, who has done nothing wrong except for waking her up. “Sorry,” she mumbles to it as she turns it off, feeling stupid and so very tired and so very sad, too, for the poor dishwasher that did nothing but its job.   
She needs to learn how to stop empathizing with the appliances, but between Sora — the empath — and her dads… well. She has no teacher in the house. Maybe Riku, who feels like an appliance himself and keeps insisting no one should have empathy or compassion for him and his plights. 

Oh, right. She had to go and have a chat with her new brother. Well, no time like the present. Even if the present is more than late enough for Riku — and everyone else not insomniac — to be blissfully asleep in their own bed. 

She slugs through the apartment, every step a stab in her eyes, every rustle of her clothes a burning rod in her brain. It’s all good, she tells herself. All normal. It’s not sickness, it’s just sleep deprivation.   
It’s not like Sora’s migraines, she won’t break into a blood fountain anytime soon. Not even if her magic is so restless. She will never suffer what Sora has to suffer. Had to? He probably doesn’t risk dying ever again, now that he has bonded with his Knight, after all. She hopes he doesn’t. 

Riku is not asleep. He lays on his bed, alone — well, obviously, Sora is not brave enough to sleep with him, even if he wants to — with his eyes to the ceiling, looking for every intent and purposes like a statue of salt, pale like marble.   
And his eyes glow in the dark. 

“Damn,” Xion says, her voice sounding so very bad and so very deep and so very rough. Her mind slowly turning to sludge in her skull. “That’s a neat feature.” 

“Xion,” Riku says, and he almost manages to hide the jump through his skin he just did. Xion has trained eyes, sadly for him, and he can’t keep his rep of stoic, untouchable, inhuman clone. “I thought you were asleep.”

“I was,” she tells him, and since he’s sitting up anyway, and her back hurts a ton, she just goes with her instincts and sits with him on the bed. “We’re having a sleepover.”

“Wouldn’t it be better if you went back to sleep?”

“Probably,” she says, waving his concerns away. Or, well, she tries to. His concerns seem to be rooted at the rock-bottom of his eyes. It’s whatever, she doesn’t even feel as bad as some other times. She’s just pathologically insomniac, and the magic is making it worse, and Riku has never seen her like this before, and he does seem like quite the worrywart, anyway. “But we’re having a sleepover. And you’re not sleeping either, so.”

“I was— I. I was thinking. About stuff,” Riku stammers, the glow of his eyes getting brighter, far too bright for Xion’s building headache. Far too bright for the darkness of the room, too. It’s like forgetting to turn the phone’s brightness down, really. Burning rods in her eyes. Or was it burning rods in her brain?   
It’s whatever, really. The point is, it hurts like fuck.   
Xion closes her eyes and accepts the pain that will follow her into the new day. 

“Stuff,” she mocks his voice, going as far as to make quote marks with her fingers. “You’re transparent to me.”

“So are you,” Riku says, and.   
And.   
He’s right.   
He has been mind-melding with Sora, of course he knows how to read her. Damn her and her poor planning. Of course Riku knows everything about her. 

“Yeah, so what?” she says, her mask not enough to make him believe she has control of the situation. That she has known this and she’s not fazed. But Sora would see through this facade and so can Riku, by proxy. “Okay whatever. Let’s play this with our cards on the table, then.”

“What are we playing?” Riku asks, wary and weary. She can’t be worried for the bags around his eyes because she has them too, darker and more pronounced and hers have been there for longer, too. She can’t worry for him without him turning it on her, and rightfully so. 

This isn’t going as Xion wanted it to, imagined it would. This is completely backwards and wrong, but she wants his honesty and she can’t play it smooth under these damned circumstances. Her brother couldn’t wait a week or so before bonding, could he? No Sora has to do everything at once. Meet and greet and mind-meld under 48 hours, speedrunning his life like he will get a trophy out of it at the end of the line. “Twenty questions.”

“Xion, be serious or go to bed,” Riku scolds her, and he sounds totally like Sora. Which means he sounds totally like he’s trying to be Leon. Xion laughs at him from the bottom of her heart. 

“You looked so sad at dinner. I thought I would be a good sis and come check on you,” she says, and he knows she means it, too. She isn’t used to this. Honesty is… not her style. Not at all.  
She reserves this for special occasions, really. Tearful nights when Rinoa’s name gets dropped, other tearful nights when Sora is barely breathing through all the blood he’s losing. She reserves this for the rainy, tearful days, not for improvised sleepovers where everything she wants is to poke fun and offer some form of comfort. But Riku isn’t Sora and she doesn’t think he will let her get away with half truths and sarcasm. He doesn’t look the type. “What happened between you and Sora? Why are you… not with him?”  
Riku hunches, his shoulders weighted down, and his eyes glow away from Xion’s face. He starts to say something, and Xion interrupts him before the first syllable is even out of his mouth. “Cards on the table.”

He sighs, heavily and warm in the chilled air. It hits Xion’s arm, just the ghost of humid heat and a shiver runs down her spine. “We had an argument,” Riku says, painful like nails on chalkboard. Xion moves her hand in a circle, inviting him to keep going. Riku closes his eyes and the green glow makes his eyelids look like wet paper full of blood vessels. “About the Herd. And he doesn’t listen to me. At all. And— and. Then the Commander wouldn’t listen either and then— and. I don’t want to be here. At all. But I can’t leave. The magic is. Ugh,” Riku says. Xion follows him for as much as she can, but all these broken segments don’t even begin to make a whole sentence and all she knows is that Riku is conflicted.   
She can relate to that. “I think. It’s stupid but I think I love him,” he adds, in the end, his voice weird and breathy, far away. It’s probably the magic, talking through him, and it makes a whole ton of sense for it to be, too, because Riku has known Sora for a week and some hours and—   
Well. No one could learn to love someone in so little time. Especially someone like Sora. “I mean—” Riku says. “I don’t know what I mean. Yes, I love him, my magic loves him, my magic and his magic are _one_. Of course I love him, he’s my Sorcerer. But I don’t— It’s not the normal kind of love. It’s not. Like that?”

“Are you asking me?” Xion says, shrugging even if his eyes are sill closed. He will know, somehow. She hopes he will know she has shrugged. “I think I know, anyway. Magic loves differently than humans do.”

“Yeah,” Riku mumbles. He raises one of his eyelids to look at her, and for a moment they understand each other perfectly. “Don’t remind me of this in the morning.”

“I’m not that cruel.”

**Author's Note:**

> A note about the Underage tags: they apply only to the first couple of chapters, because Sora and Xion are seventeen years and eleven months old at the start of the fic.


End file.
